A YOUNG CUCKOO 75 



company of the Cuckoo, I seated upon the slope 

 beside the nest, he perching as usual upon my hand 

 or knee, or sitting beside me in the grass. 



At the foot of the slope, half a dozen yards below, 

 was a low sea wall ; beyond it the band of coarse 

 shingle, narrower now because the sea was playing 

 upon it. A strange place for a Cuckoo to be born 

 in ; a strange first scene in life for this woodland bird 

 to have looked out upon ; a perilous place indeed ; 

 for on the one hand was open sea, and on the other, 

 beyond the foot-way, open fields with very distant 

 trees, towards which his ground-feeding foster-parents 

 would probably not be drawn to lead him. And he 

 himself had as yet seen more of ships than of trees. 



Thinking of these things, and others for my last 

 night by the sea ere returning inland has in it always 

 something of my first night at sea when outward 

 bound I yet felt glad to have known this small 

 strange creature as a being, albeit so wrapped in 

 mystery as a bird. And knowing it for a solitary 

 and a wanderer beyond any of its kind, smuggled 

 into life in an alien nest, tended in blind devotion by 

 creatures it requites as blindly by destroying their 

 own offspring ; fashioned like a hawk to be hunted 

 by every chit that flies ; never to mate, never to nest, 

 never to rear or lead its young ; remembering this, 

 I could have wished that this Unnatural Selection 

 had not been, or that this strange mockery of life 

 might be undone. 



They are not conscious of loss, it will be said, who 

 do not remember possession. To which very rational 

 protest, it may be implied one may like a Cuckoo 

 and care little for conundrums. 



