2 14 BIRDS OF THE WAVE AND WOODLAND 



often as much melody as the days. Not so much chatter 

 and chirruping and twittering, but quite as much song, for 

 there are none of our singing-birds that, when the fancy takes 

 them, will not add a beauty to a fine night by their music. 

 Sleeping out of doors (I do so as often as I can get the 

 chance), I have at one time or another heard them all, the 

 cuckoo and the owl too-ether, the robin and the ni^htineale. 

 There is one exception, the skylark, and inasmuch 

 as I have never heard it singing in the dark, I always 

 consider it either the sleepiest or the most methodical of 

 all birds. To call the lark lazy and a "slug-abed," to use 

 Shakespeare's word, sounds, I know, like treason, for has 

 not every poet from Chaucer onwards told us that it wakes 

 the day; and is not "to rise with the lark" a household 

 word for being up very early ? But if we come to 

 prosy facts, they are all dead against the skylark, for by the 

 time it begins to think of awaking the day, the other birds 

 have been already doing it for hours. Of course, it may 

 be that the sun does not pay any attention to the other 

 birds, regards them as unlicensed watchmen who have no 

 business to try and wake him up before his proper time, and 

 that he waits for the lark, as the only genuine certificated 

 waker-up of the firmament, before he gets out of bed. Robins 

 and blackcaps, woodlarks and reed-warblers are perhaps 

 mere irresponsible amateurs. The skylark is the one 

 properly diploma'd professor. He alone really knows when 



