THE SUMMER BIRDS 



feelings, such as are expressed by a forgotten sonnet, 

 which opens by apostrophizing him as " Thou mono- 

 tonous bird! " and closes by wishing he would call for 

 ever. For all his sins, and his sleep- destroying calls to 

 the rising sun, he has some magnetic power to compel 

 our liking. And a hundred stories prove how he makes 

 slaves of other birds ; so that if a helpless young cuckoo 

 is kept in a cage with a young thrush, scarcely fledged, 

 the thrush will feed its fellow-prisoner with utmost 

 solicitude. 



CHIFFCHAFFS, all through an April Eastertide, delight 

 holiday-makers by their cheering song of 

 First Leaf- two notes. These little leaf- warblers are 

 Warblers now established favourites, and it is re- 

 markable to recall that, like willow-wrens 

 and wood- wrens, they were hardly known in the 

 eighteenth century, and had no English names; it 

 might almost be said that they were discovered by 

 White of Selborne. The willow-wren (though he con- 

 fused it with the garden-warbler) he knew by its 

 " joyous, easy laughing note," a happy description of 

 its silvery chime ; the chiffchaff he called " the chirper," 

 making the surprising statement, " It utters two sharp 

 piercing notes, so loud in hollow woods as to occasion 

 an echo." 



THEY came over the cliffs of Newhaven in the grey of 

 dawn, resolving themselves from a small, 



The First smudgy cloud on the horizon into pur- 



Swallows poseful units, their identity clear from the 

 forked tails. Soaring over the cliffs at fifty 



miles an hour, the party began to break up before it was 



49 E 



