BLACK-BILLED CUCKOO. 
Cuckoo does that to perfection, and he has been cele- 
brated most thoroughly by the musician, the poet, and 
the Swiss manufacturer of clocks. Long years ago 
(1832) an Englishman, William Gardiner, wrote: ‘‘The 
plough-boy bids him welcome in the early morn, Borne 
by fragrant gales, he leaves his distant home, for our 
sunny spots—the coppice and the mead. Children mark 
his well-known song, crying 
i 
Cuc-koo. 
One of the most beautiful poems in the English lan 
guage is that by John Logan, To the Cuckoo, written 
somewhere about 1775, and beginning : 
‘* Hail, beauteous stranger of the grove! 
Thou messenger of spring ! 
Now heaven repairs thy rural seat, 
And woods thy welcome sing.” 
And he does not forget the natural imitativeness of the 
child, for he continues : 
** The school-boy wandering through the wood 
To pull the primrose gay, 
Starts, the new voice of spring to hear, 
And imitates thy lay.” 
Nor does the greatest of all musicians, the immortal 
Beethoven, fail to recognize the perfection of simplicity 
in the Cuckoo’s song, for near the close of ‘‘ The scene 
by the brook” in the Pastoral Symphony he introduces 
the two familiar notes along with the trill of the Night- 
ingale anda the cali of the European Quail, thus: 
| pow Nightingale, iL 
aaraal i A a 
(nia PAH SRE 
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