THE RING-OUZEL AS A SONGSTER 133 



sessinp the cliucklc and all the manners and j^estures 

 of tliat familiar being; yet n(jt the real blackbird, not 

 our blackbird, the old favourite of wood and orchard 

 and garden. For this real blackbird, the "garden ouzel," 

 as our ancients of the seventeenth century called it, is 

 to us so unlike all other feathered beings in figure, 

 colouring, flight, gestures, voice; withal so distinguished 

 among birds, that we have come to look on it as the one 

 and only blackbird in existence. A thrush, it is true, 

 but modified and raised as far above those olive-coloured 

 spotty birds as the lovely and graceful grey wagtail is 

 above the modest little creeping pipits it springs from. 

 That we have been told of other blackbirds in many lands 

 does not matter, since what we hear about such things 

 does not impress us — we forget and practically disbelieve 

 it. The sight of a ring-ouzel thus deprives us of an 

 illusion. 



I was not affected in that way at the Peak, having 

 met the bird a long time before in other parts of the 

 country, but its song had remained unknown and I had 

 come to hear it. Nor had I long to wait for that 

 pleasure. On my way to the small hovel of a farm- 

 house, on Axe Edge, where I had arranged to stay, 

 while walking in the old forsaken road, worn very deep 

 and thickly bestrewn with loose stones like the bed of 

 a dry mountain torrent, I caught the sound of a bird 

 voice unknown to me, and peeping over the bank at the 

 roadside, beheld the ring-ouzel within twenty yards of 

 me, sitting on a stone wall, emitting his brief song at 

 intervals of less than half a minute. 



