BIRDS OF THE WAVE AND WOODLAND 99 



" From the neighbouring vale 

 The Cuckoo, straggling tip the hill-tops 

 Shouteth faint tidings of some gladder place!^ 



Wordsworth. 



Lone after the rook, the thrush, and blackbird have 

 told us of the change of season, "the vernal cuckoo " comes 

 shouting "the same song to sing." There is no parable in 

 Nature so hard to interpret as this bird which the ancients, 

 themselves puzzled, placed on the sceptre of Juno and the 

 shoulder of Venus. The poet who hesitated to call it a 

 bird — 



" Shall I call thee bird, 

 Or but a wandering voice ? 

 No bird, but an invisible thing, 

 A voice, a mystery," — 



was not in doubt without reason. For it is, indeed, a mystery. 

 Without a sinsfle "domestic" instinct, dividing its affections 

 among all the mates it meets, making no nest, caring for no 

 young, leaving the country as it came, without kith and kin, 

 it is a bird to wonder at and to puzzle over. How comes it 

 that it lays so small an ^gg, and so coloured that it can leave 

 it in little birds' nests without exciting their suspicion ? and 

 what law in Nature makes the small foster-parents so idolise 



