414 BOTAURUS STELLARIS. 



Mudie, avIio appears to consider himself quite familiar with 

 it, describes it thus : — He is wandering in the twilight by 

 the side of a bog, and hears a rustle among the reeds, 

 " accompanied by the brush of a rather powerful wing. 

 You look round the dim horizon, but there is no bird ; 

 another rustle of the wing, and another, still weaker and 

 weaker, but not a moving thing between you and the sky 

 around. You feel rather disappointed — foolish, if you are 

 daring ; fearful, if you are timid. Anon a burst of uncouth 

 and savage laughter breaks over you, piercingly or rather 

 gratingly loud, and so unwonted and odd, that it sounds as 

 if the voices of a bull and a horse were combined, the former 

 breaking down his bellow to suit the neigh of the latter, in 

 mocking you from the sky. That is the love-song of the 

 Bittern, with which he serenades his mate; and uncouth 

 and harsh as it sounds to you, that mate hears it with far 

 more pleasure than she would the sweetest chorus of the 

 grove ; and when the surprise with which you are at first 

 taken is over, you begin to discover that there is a sort of 

 modulation in the singular sound. As the bird utters it he 

 wheels in a spiral, expanding his voice as the loops widen, 

 and sinking it as they close; and though you can just 

 dimly discover him between you and the zenith, it is worth 

 while to hie down on your back and watch the style of his 

 flight, which is as fine as it is peculiar. The sound comes 

 better out, too, when you are in that position ; and there is 

 an echo, and, as you would readily imagine, a shaking of the 

 ground; not that, according to the tale of the poets, the 

 bird thrusts his bill into the marsh, and shakes that with 

 his booming, though (familiar as I once was for years with 

 the sound and all the observable habits of Bitterns) some 

 kindly critic, on a former occasion, laboured to convert me 

 from that heresy. A quagmire would be but a sorry instru- 

 ment even for a Bittern's music; but when the Bittern 

 booms and bleats overhead, one certainly feels as if the earth 

 were shaking; but it is probably nothing more than the 

 general affection of the sentient system by the jarring upon 

 the ear — an affection which we more or less feel in the case 

 of all harsh and grating sounds, more especially when they 



