A CITY OF BIRDS 69 



of all life, with its persistent command " You've got 

 to be good, and you've got to find out what good is," 

 or you shall die. Every living creature answers the 

 call upon it according to its capacities, but we are failing 

 to make our responses to new and higher calls made upon 

 us, and the wages of failure is death. Yet to be cast down 

 at the evil of our times is to lose our sense of horizons, to 

 neglect the circumference for the centre of the circle, and 

 to forget that the surprising thing is not the amount of ill 

 in the world, but of good. We have been barbarians for a 

 year and semi-civilized beings for a day, and God must be 

 given his own time to make his work good. Only he 

 thinks it time we said good-bye to barbarism. 



The fascination of the town are its daws and rooks. 

 The former, known as the " Bishop's Jacks," to distin- 

 guish them from the " Ebor Jacks," which breed two 

 miles away in the Mendips, are at their best in autumn 

 in the early morning and evening, when the day's busi- 

 ness in the fields is over or before them, and the recrea- 

 tions of leisure are in full swing. In the evening they 

 straggle homewards " in scramble sort " with the rooks 

 (with whom they feed), the calm, regular, sonorous bass 

 of the latter contrasted with the ringing staccato and 

 sprightly barking cries of the daws, volleyed crisply 

 from one angle of the stone to another. 



Daws are the most boyish, mischievous, impish, 

 happy-go-lucky and mirthful of all the crows. It is 

 pleasant indeed to think of this boyishness in conjunction 

 with the antiquity of the cathedral, and again to think 

 of these daws as older than any cathedral, and the 

 cathedral itself eternally young in art. But the cathedral 

 histories have nothing to say of the daws, as in the 

 descriptions of Bishop Still's black marble tomb they 

 have nothing to say of his black-lettered ditty. 1 The 

 irreverent sportiveness of the daws, whether they are 

 diving, soaring, floating or tumbling up in their blue 

 pastures or about the great central tower, or sitting 

 clamouring on the heads and shoulders of the holy 



1 Actually he did not write it, but that does not exonerate the 

 ecclesiastics, since only of very recent years has it been shown 

 that Still's song has been drawn illicitly from him. 



