218 SUMMER 



in most ways. It sings in November and in July. It begins 

 in good time in the morning and takes few rests during the 

 day. Often you may hear its still energetic song an hour, 

 sometimes two hours, after most of the rest are silent. It 

 sees the stars up as well as the sun down. It is in the choir 

 at vespers. Its rival is the robin. But the robin's song at 

 these late hours has become little more than a chirrup on two 

 notes, a song sung only to show that the singer is awake. 

 Between the robin's last call and the thrush's good-night 

 halloo there is no interval of silence. The night singers are 

 already at work, and their company is not limited to the 

 nightingale. The swallow often sings in the dark, and the 

 sedge-warbler and the cuckoo are as regular at night as 

 the owl, if song is allowed to describe the wild tu-whit of 

 the barn-door or the monotonous cry of the little owl. 



When summer opens some birds in song may be heard 

 all round the circle of day and night. But the period is soon 

 over. It ends almost abruptly. The night songs first cease, 

 then the midday songs, and finally a robin's chirp, or a 

 short impetuous burst from the large-hearted wren, are the 

 only birds singing in the garden ; and you may travel 

 a hundred miles along the road without hearing any other 

 note than the depressed monotonous refrain, ' Little-bit-o'- 

 bread-and-no-cheese ' from the yellow-hammer, or a very 

 wheezy and short bar from the corn-bunting. We notice 

 this ending of the song-time less because another music takes 

 its place. As the birds drop into silence, the hum, the 

 murmur, the buzz of insect wings, and the grating of the 

 grasshoppers' legs take their place. ' The poetry of earth 

 is never dead,' wrote Keats, and the sound that set him to 

 writing that admirable sonnet was the scrape of the grass- 

 hopper and cricket. Almost like the insect note is the croon 

 and murmur that may be heard from a few of the birds. The 



