BIRDS OF THE WAVE AND WOODLAND 117 



never a voice replies. And so homewards, up through the 

 nieadow, hummocked with hay-coclvs, and rough to the feet 

 with short grass-stubble, from which the sleepy skylarks 

 spring at every step : up to the elms that shade the garden, 

 and on to the lawn. The bats wheel overhead, their soft 

 wings crumpling as they turn their somersaults, but never a 

 voice in the air, save sharp needle-points of sound, as flitter- 

 mouse calls to flittermouse. Only from among the wheat, 

 now here, now there, comes up the cry of the rail, Crake-crake. 



It is a charming bird, sufficiently rare to make the seeing 

 of it an event to remember all the summer ; the finding of 

 its nest a triumph. And then to see the young ones ! — little 

 black imps that run like spiders. Once only in my life could 

 I have shot one. I was out with my gun, " strolling round " 

 for the unconsiderins: evenina^ rabbit, when all of a sudden 

 from under my feet, in the furrow that separated the turnips 

 from a patch of lucerne, up got a bird, and its slow, clumsy 

 fiight told me that it was a corn-crake, and for the sake of its 

 little black imps I lowered my gun and let the poor mother go. 



But the corn-crake has done crying, or has wandered 

 away into another field beyond hearing, and here in the 

 garden the voices of Nature soon reassert themselves, and, 

 resonant above the rest, the blackcap is singing 



" musical and loud, 

 Buried amons; the twinkling leaves," 



