A GENERAL VIEW 9 



With ten thousand throats they ' carol from the 

 flowering thorn ' their sense of the joy of living. 

 As a boy-angler on a spring morning, with a long 

 day before him and Jed- Water at his feet, he is ever 

 and again drawn from his pastime to listen to their 

 concert : the whole woodland seems to be warbling 

 around him. He dreams, as he stands, of what it 

 Yo must have been in the Golden Age 



When music held the world in perfect peace. 



He next notices their usefulness to man to the Their use- 

 gardener and the farmer in destroying those insect f^ ness - 

 armies which, though individually a feeble race, are 

 capable by their numbers of blighting the promise of 

 the spring and ' killing the year '. He is no wise 

 fruit-grower who, in the season of bud and blossom, 

 scares the little trooping birds from his orchard. 

 And well may they in winter, ' tamed by the cruel 



so season ', present themselves at the barndoor when 

 winnowing is in operation, and claim the little boon 

 of grains ' which Providence assigns them '. 



But their fits of silence are scarcely less noticeable Their fits 

 than their singing. It is not alone as winter comes f sllence - 

 on, when they sit apart mutely shivering in the 

 tawny copse, or gathered together in sympathetic 

 community of misery on some dead tree, that these 

 lapses into silence occur. Even in summer a sudden 

 silence occasionally seems to seize them. It is a signi- 



90 ficant silence, predictive to the thoughtful observer of 

 a downpour. They sit preening their feathers, or rather 

 streaking their wings with oil, as if expecting the 

 coming deluge, and making preparation 



To throw the lucid moisture trickling off. 



