A VOCIFEROUS BABY. 65 



More startling, however, than his protest was a 

 cry of anguish that answered it from the woods, 

 a heart-rending, terrible cry, the wail of a 

 mother about to be bereaved. I looked up, and 

 lo ! in plain sight, in her agony forgetting her 

 danger, and begging by every art in her power, 

 a cuckoo. Her distress went to my heart ; I 

 could not resist her pleading. One instant I 

 held that vociferous cuckoo baby, to have a good 

 look at him, speaking soothingly to the mother 

 the while, and then opened my hand, when he 

 half flew, half scrambled, to the other side of 

 the road, and set up another cry, more like that 

 of his mother. Seeing her infant at liberty, she 

 slipped back into the woods and resumed the 

 calls, which sounded so remarkably like tapping, 

 while he started up the road, answering; and 

 thus I left them. 



Several times after that, I heard from the 

 woods — for 



" The cuckoo delights in the cool leafy shadows 

 Where the nest and its treasures are rocked by the breeze " — 



the same strange calling of a cuckoo mother, a 

 weird, unearthly, knocking sound, not in the 

 least like the ordinary " kuk ! kuk ! " of the 

 bird. I should never have suspected that it was 

 anything but the tap of an unusually cautious 

 woodpecker, if I had not caught her at it that 

 night. 



