THE MARSH WARBLER'S MUSIC 209 



minute, gem-like, winged bodies of strange shapes 

 and gem-like minds to match, they come upon us 

 like a living glittering dust shaken from the tail of 

 some comet in our summer skies — a dust that will 

 settle down by-and-by and vanish when the air 

 grows cool at the approach of winter. 



But little birds — dear little birds or darlings as we 

 may call them without rebuke — are vertebrates and 

 relations, with knowing, emotional, thinking brains 

 like ours in their heads, and with senses like ours, only 

 brighter. Their beauty and grace, so much beyond 

 ours, and their faculty of flight which enables them 

 to return to us each year from such remote outlandish 

 places, their winged swift souls in winged bodies, do 

 not make them uncanny but only fairy-like. Thus we 

 love and know them, and our more highly developed 

 minds are capable of bridging the gulf which divides 

 us from them, and divides bird from mammal. 

 Small as they are bodily, in some cases no bigger than 

 one of a man's ten toes, we know they are on the 

 same tree of life as ourselves, grown from the same 

 root, with the same warm red blood in their veins, 

 and red blood is thicker than water — certainly it is 

 thicker than the colourless fluid which is the life 

 of the insect. 



To come back to particulars, and the subject oi 

 this chapter, there are very great differences in the 

 temper and behaviour of even the smallest birds of 

 different species in the presence of their human 

 fellow-beings. Some are strangely, unaccountably 

 shy, and so suspicious that they will not comport 



