BIRD MUSIC 143 



it that these well-to-do well-fed gentlemen w^rc victims 

 of gout and riicumatism. 



In this crowd of sufferers mixed with fashionables 

 I was alone, out of my element, depressed, and should 

 have been miserable but for a small bird, or rather of 

 a small small bird voice. Every day wlien I went to 

 the well in the gardens to drink a tumbler of magnesia 

 water and sit there for an hour or so I heard the same 

 delicate wandering aerial sound, the thin plaintive note 

 of tlie same little bird, a willow wren, which had taken 

 lip its summer-end residence at that spot. I do not 

 mean a song; a little bird when moulting concealed in 

 a thick shrubbery, has no heart to sing: it was only his 

 familiar faint little sorrowful call-note. 



People came in numbers at certain hours of the day 

 to the spring and pavilion to drink water and sit in 

 groups chatting, flirting, laughing, or to pace the walks, 

 while the children ran and romped about the green lawns 

 or sailed their little boats on the running water; and 

 by-and-by the crowd would begin to drift away as meal 

 time approached, until the gardens would be silent and 

 deserted. But the small bird was always there, and 

 though hidden among the bushes where they grew thick- 

 est he was not wholly invisible. At intervals his minute 

 shadowy flitting form could be discerned at some spot 

 where there was a slight opening among the dense 

 clustered leaves, seen for a moment or two, then gone. 

 And even when the place was fullest of people and the 

 sound of talk and laughter loudest, still at brief inter- 

 vals that faint, tenuous, sorrowful little sound would be 



