180 REPTILES AND BIRDS. 
charming songsters, which add so much attraction to country life and 
solitary rambles. In the silence of night, when Nature sleeps, and 
- life seems suspended, all at once certain notes of harmony rise from 
under the dense foliage, as if to protest against the universal silence. 
It is sometimes a plaintive cry, prolonged into a sigh, now a con- 
tinuous warbling, now a lively song, gay and melodious, which the 
whole forest re-echoes to. 
When the darkness of night gives place to the first dawn of day 
—when the soft gleam of Aurora has appeared on the horizon, all is 
transformed, all is vivified on the new-born earth, lately asleep and 
apparently deserted. The larger birds rise higher and higher in the 
air, till they are lost in the clouds. ‘The small birds hop from branch 
to branch with joyous gambols, communicating a feeling of happi- 
ness and content to all Nature. What a wonderful variety of 
music they produce—what dazzling brilliancy decks their plumage— 
what a charm pervades the whole scene, enlivened by these living 
flowers flitting about in intense enjoyment! Be it a titmouse, which 
seems to spend its life in constant motion; or the fly-catcher, on the 
other hand, always perched ; the lark, performing its graceful circles 
in the air as it rises higher and higher, pouring forth its melodious 
song more vigorously with each circle described ; the thrush, which 
runs along the grassy path, watching for its prey, or the house 
sparrow chirping from the straw-built roof, or the robin warbling 
from some leafless bower—how much the little winged wanderers 
decorate the landscape and improve the picture with their innocent 
gambols ! 
Assuredly birds have a language, for when danger threatens them 
a peculiar cry is uttered by one, and immediately all of the same 
species hide until their fears are dispelled or confidence restored ; or 
when the presence of a bird of prey is announced by the plaintive 
voice of the thrush, all the feathered race of the neighbourhood are 
hushed into silence. 
Birds of prey with carnivorous instincts frequent the most solitary 
places. The eagle lives with its mate in some unapproachable 
mountain pass, where its nest is placed on the sides of a steeply- 
scarped precipice, or on the verge of an inaccessible ravine, whence 
they sally forth in search of prey. 
It is very difficult to comprehend the intelligence exhibited by 
Birds. In the Mammifers, whose organisation approaches nearer to 
our own, we are enabled partially to comprehend their joys and 
griefs ; but in the case of Birds we are reduced to conjecture in 
order to arrive at an estimate of their sensations. To explain this 
