A CITY OF BIRDS 55 



II 



But I am forgetting my little town and its birds. 

 At the end of March the blackthorn at the edge of the 

 town is nearly over, and is as beautiful then as when 

 its outlines are more definite. As is usual with the rose 

 tribe, the petals have dropped off, leaving the innumerable 

 white stamens, like the white filaments of the egret 

 on a miniature scale, protruding from the corolla. The 

 effect at a distance is as though the black twigs were 

 wreathed in a luminously white spray or in scarves of 

 mist which must soon evaporate upon the air. Approach- 

 ing the cathedral from the fields, the grey stone screened 

 but not hidden from view by a tracery of "glad light 

 grene," I was like a traveller discovering some wonderful 

 city of legend, and now that I have left it, the memories 

 remain draped over my mind like the green shoots over 

 the stone walls. 



It is one of the more cherished of them that I found 

 on the borders the first pair of whitethroats I had 

 seen that year love-making on May llth. There was 

 the male, singing his grating, exuberant song in an 

 abandonment of love and glee, swelling out his throat, 

 flirting his tail, swaying his body, leaping into the air 

 in a transport and somersaulting back to his twig. How 

 different is his singing, which seems to sprout from the 

 gesticulating body and the whole nervous fluid of his 

 temperament, from the deliberate pose of the chaffinch, 

 as he takes his stand on a bough and proceeds formally 

 to sing his rivals down in that set flourish which 

 Mr. Hudson calls " a musical sneeze " ! 



Bird-watching is full of surprises, and I fancy any 

 moderately competent observer could, in the course of 

 years, collect enough facts about the habits of birds to 

 place against most of the text-book information that 

 denies them. Not that the text-books are wrong. But 

 the fact that one compiler in his study is apt to take 

 upon his shoulders the generalizations of his pre- 

 decessor ; that nature will not be cut to the measuring 

 yard, and that the observation of birds unharmed 

 and in their natural homes is a comparatively new 



