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hear him after the middle of August ; so I conjecture he leaves us 

 early in September. This bird is found from Germany, Holland, 

 and France, to Sweden, and also in Morocco. It frequents woods 

 of medium growth in preference to plantations, thickets, copses, 

 and hedgerows, and it loves especially birch and beech woods, 

 where the undergrowth is not so dense. When the males arrive, 

 which they do a few days before the females — a curious circum- 

 stance in nearly all our warblers, and one I have never heard 

 satisfactorily accounted for — they mount higher up in the trees 

 than either the Willow Warbler or the Chiff Chaff, and there begin 

 their song. This I cannot describe satisfactorily by words ; its 

 note is very peculiar and shrill, resembling the word " twee " 

 repeated slowly twice or thrice, and then followed by a sort of 

 shake, or hurried repetition of the same tone, accompanied by a 

 vibratory action of the wings, which curiously affects the song. In 

 pairing time you will often hear them tweeing and trilling against 

 each other, to win their dames, as if they would shiver themselves 

 to pieces. They will also stop in the middle of their song, and 

 give forth a strange, sad, melancholy note, to which the late Canon 

 Kingsley thus beautifully alludes in his "Prose Idylls": — 



"Yon Wood Wren has had enough to make him sad, if he only recollects 

 it ; and if he can recollect his road from Morocco hither, he maybe recollects 

 what happened on the road — the long weary journey up the Portuguese coast 

 and through the gap between the Pyrenees and the Jaysquival, and up the 

 Landes of Bordeaux, and across Brittany, flitting by night, and hiding and 

 feeding as he could by day ; and how his mates flew against the lighthouse, 

 and were killed by hundreds ; and how he essayed the British Channel and was 

 blown back, shrivelled up by bitter blasts ; and how he felt, nevertheless, that 

 'that wan water he must cross,' he knew not why ; but something told him 

 that his mother had done so before him, and he was flesh of her flesh, hfe of 

 her life, and had inherited her ' instinct, ' as we call hereditary memory, in order 

 to avoid the trouble of finding out what it is and how it comes. A duty was 

 laid on him to go back to the place where he was bom, and he must do it ; and 

 now it is done ; and he is weary, and sad, and lonely ; and for aught we know 

 thinking already that when the leaves begin to turn yellow he must go back again 

 over the channel, over the Landes, over the Pyrenees to Morocco once more. Why 

 should he not be sad ? He is a very delicate bird, as both his shape and his 

 note testify. He can hardly keep up the race here in England ; and is accord- 



