148 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



had seemed this subdued lyric from a songster we 

 regard as very inferior to some of the warblers in 

 delicacy and expressiveness. 



On another occasion I was walking across a furze- 

 grown common after dark on a very cold windy evening 

 in early April when at a distance of about forty yards 

 from me a whinchat warbled the fullest, sweetest song 

 I ever listened to from that bird. After a brief in- 

 terval the song was repeated, then once again. Whether 

 it was the exceeding purity of the sound, so clear, so 

 wondrously sweet, so unexpected at that hour, or 

 the darkness and silence of that solitary place which 

 gave it an almost preternatural beauty I cannot say, 

 but the effect on me was so great that I have never 

 walked by night in spring in any furzy place without 

 pausing and listening from time to time with the 

 pleased expectation of hearing it again. 



Probably in these two instances and in a dozen others 

 which I could cite the song was uttered by chance at 

 the precise moment when it would be most impressive 

 — when the conditions and the mood they had induced 

 were most favourable. But the sound too may create 

 the mood, as was the case in the following instance. 



I have heard many wonderful blackbirds, for like 

 all songsters, feathered as well as human, they vary 

 greatly in merit, and face Dr. A. R. Wallace, there is 

 such a thing as genius in nature, but I think the one 

 which most impressed me was just an ordinary black- 

 bird. I was staying at a farmhouse in the New Forest, 

 and on the side of the house where I slept there was a 



