THE IMMORTAL NIGHTINGALE 239 



"I lost my wife shortly afterwards. That was 

 five years ago, and from that time we have had no 

 nightingale here." 



It was not strange that the tragedy of the little 

 bird had made a very deep impression on him; that 

 the death of his wife coming shortly afterwards had 

 actually caused him to think there was something 

 out of the natural in it. But I could not say that I 

 was of his opinion, though I could believe that the 

 acute distress she had suffered at witnessing such a 

 thing, and possibly the effect of thinking too much 

 about it, had aggravated her malady and perhaps 

 even hastened her end. 



For the rest, the accident to the nightingale, which 

 deprived the rectory and the village of its singer, 

 is not an uncommon one among birds; our windows 

 as well as our overhead wires are a danger to them. 

 I have seen a small bird on a good many occasions 

 dash itself against a window-pane; and, in one 

 instance, at a country house in Ireland, the bird, 

 a chiffchaff, came violently against my bedroom 

 window twice when I stood in the room watching it. 

 The attraction was a fly crawling up the pane inside. 

 But this explanation does not fit the case of the 

 nightingale with other cases I have observed; he is 

 not like the warblers and the pied wagtail (a frequent 

 striker against window-glass) a pursuer of flies. No 

 doubt birds are sometimes dazzled and confused or 

 hypnotised by the glitter of the glass with the sun 

 on it, and in this case the singing-bush of the bird 

 was directly before the window, at a distance of 



