THE BUNTINGS 173 



in any full degree pose tit. The same may indeed it just has been 

 said of E. citrinella, and in E. schceniclus (called also, sometimes, the 

 reed-bunting) we have these qualities at height But for a certain 

 washed purity and pleasure of soft hair-pencillings, the plumage of 

 this little bird is much like a sparrow's, so is his size, and his shape, 

 though more shapely, yet something so but who would say that he 

 is like that bird ? Wherever the sparrow is, there he has projected 

 himself; into whatever scene the reed-bunting flies, hops, flutters, or 

 perches, he seems always to have grown out of it. How else has it 

 happened when, sitting stilly amidst the sedge and alder-growth of 

 some small reedy stream (to watch dabchicks at play, perhaps, my 

 "contemplative man's recreation"), his high, clear, yet sad-lingering 

 call-notes, with a lower one, sometimes, like a soft little hiss, if heard 

 closely, fall all around one, and there, all at once, the birds are? 

 Though the arrival of such a little flock of them may be often quite 

 sudden, though, to have entered the reed-beds, they may have pitched 

 steeply down from the sky, as their custom is, yet, once there, so 

 much are they a part of the still scene, the dank surroundings, that 

 it is as though they had always been there they do not seem to have 

 come. So like, so in consonance are they with their setting, that 

 what but frames them seems to have brought them forth ; it is out of, 

 not into it, that they have stepped. 



Impressions such as these are not of yesterday, and, long before 

 time had known Darwin, there were evolutionary theories to 

 account for them. To the old (and best) inhabitants of the New 

 World, humming-birds were sunbeams that had taken life, and if 

 here, upon some sear, autumn day, when the wind, blowing strongly 

 over the wide marshes, carried bits of brown, broken reed on its wings, 

 wailing as it went if these had been metamorphosed and become 

 birds, it would have been reed-buntings, surely, that they would have 

 turned into. Had I been born a pagan, to believe in such things (and 

 I should not have objected), nothing would have seemed to me more 

 likely, more fitting even now I can almost accept it as their origin. 



z 



