162 NATURE IN DOWNLAND 



people who have been conversing with a deaf person, 

 and when they speak to others cannot drop the habit 

 of shouting. The shepherd's manner of speaking, and 

 his voice too, I think, have been modified somewhat 

 by his surroundings. At all events, he speaks quietly 

 and has a very clear voice ; a man with a loud thick 

 speech is not a native of the hills. 



But it is when listening to the music of the larks 

 that we are best able to appreciate the wonderful 

 silence of the hills, and the refining effect of long dis- 

 tances in this pure thin atmosphere on the acutest and 

 brightest bird sounds. 



The skylark is found all over downland, and is 

 abundant wherever there is cultivation. On the sheep- 

 walks, where favourable breeding-places are compara- 

 tively few, he is so thinly distributed that you may 

 sometimes ramble about for half a day and not put up 

 more than half-a-dozen birds. And yet here, on these 

 sheep-fed hills, out of sight of corn fields, you hear the 

 lark all day long not one nor half-a-dozen, nor a score 

 or two, but many scores, and I should say hundreds of 

 larks. Go where you like, to the summit of the highest 

 hill, or down the longest slopes into the deepest combe 

 or valley at its foot, everywhere you are ringed about 

 with that perpetual unchanging stream of sound. It 

 is not a confused, nor a diffused sound, which is 

 everywhere, filling the whole air like a misty rain, or 

 a perfume, or like the universal hum of a teeming 

 insect life in a wood in summer; but a sound that 



