The Dominie and the Germans. 83 



shillings each, which but for their song would not make 

 more than eighteen pence at the most. Instead of the 

 high piercing note continued for some time by the 

 English bird without intermission, rising higher and 

 higher, or modified only by a succession of noisy bursts, 

 the German begins with a low sweet trill, like the 

 sibilating sound of the grasshopper on a summer's eve, 

 and with a silvery sonorous voice regularly descends 

 through all the tones of an octave, introducing from 

 time to time a bell-like succession of notes, or the song 

 of the woodlark and the nightingale as the case may 

 be. So great is the diiference between the two, and 

 such is the result of careful painstaking teaching, as 

 compared with the let-alone, give-myself-no-trouble 

 plan adopted by English breeders. 



The same writer who, as I have shown elsewhere, 

 exhibited so much ignorance about the Belgian canary, 

 betrays equal want of knowledge about the German, 

 when he talks about their wholesale manufacture by 

 simply putting English birds into little wooden cages 

 similar to those in which the real Germans are always im- 

 ported. No doubt John Bull is a very stupid creature 

 in many things, but we fancy he is not quite such a fool 

 as to believe such stuff as this. The writer alluded to 

 would have us believe that there is little or no difference 

 between an English bird and a German in the matter 

 of song, so that a purchaser may be easily imposed 

 upon. All that we can say is, that any one who has once 

 heard any number of German birds sing, could not 

 possibly be taken in, and that a man would hardly be 

 such a fool, we think, as to buy a bird for his song with- 



