238 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



And so with prose descriptions; we turn wearily from 

 all such vain efforts to find an ever-fresh pleasure in 

 the familiar passage in Izaak Walton, his simple ex- 

 pressions of delight in the singer "breathing such sweet 

 loud music out of her little instrumental throat, that 

 it might make mankind to think that miracles are not 

 ceased." 



The subject of the nightingale's superiority as a 

 singer does not, however, now concern us so much as 

 its distribution in England, and its return each year to 

 the same spot. To this small isolated thicket, let us 

 say, the very bird known here in past years, now away 

 perhaps in Abyssinia, will be here again about April 8 

 — alone, for he will not brook the presence of another 

 of one of his species in his small dominion, and the 

 female with which he will mate will not appear until 

 about a week or ten days later. 



How natural, then, for the listener to its song to 

 imagine it the same bird he has heard at the same place 

 in previous years! Even the oldest rustic, whose life 

 has been passed in the neighbourhood, who as a small 

 boy robbed the five olive-coloured eggs every season to 

 make a "necklace" of them with other coloured eggs 

 as an ornament for the cottage parlour; whose sons 

 took them in their childhood for the same purpose, and 

 whose grandchildren perhaps rob them now — even he 

 will think the bird he will listen to by-and-by the same 

 nightingale of all these years. But this notion is, no 

 doubt, strongest in those parts of the country where 

 the bird is more thinly distributed. Here, on the borders 



