BIRD-HAUNTED LONDON 121 



of io many lives, vastly more poetic than theirs. The 

 lark's song I first heard out of a yellow fog on 

 February 9, 1919, and in 1920 as early as the 16th 

 of a very mild January, gushing down upon the 

 earth " where men sit and hear each other groan " 

 in a shover of golden rain, rustling down and splash- 

 ing where the guttural notes sounded above the more 

 liquid ones. 



The lark's felicity is not earthy like the throstle's, 

 and its exultation is purely of the care-free heavens. 

 Our own mounting hopes and escaping thoughts seem 

 to climb that invisible staircase of sound and motion 

 up which the lark ascends and from which his music 

 descends. For neither song nor bird seem of this 

 world. Yet our conception of angels is that of inane 

 debutantes in nightgowns, with wings growing out of 

 two slits in them, borrowed from the " lower animals " 

 who are not admitted to the joys of supramundane 

 existence. 



It is usually said that larks stop singing in mid- 

 air, and drop like a stone. But they by no means 

 invariably descend in this manner, and I have often 

 watched them in this neighbourhood come sliding 

 down in a long curve, singing and vibrating their 

 expanded wings until within a few inches of the 

 ground, when they hovered for a moment, and only 

 ceased singing when their feet actually touched the 

 ground. The season of larks singing in numbers only 

 lasts with us between the first impulse to song and 

 nesting time in the first week of April. I have 

 noticed that larks, like other singing-birds, differ from 

 individual to individual in the quality of the song. 



The chaffinches, whose numbers accumulate to many 

 more than a hundred, disappear from us before their 

 marital music begins, though in the variable winter 

 of 1919-20 they began singing as early as February 

 24th, without, however, the dash and audacity of 

 spring. Thereafter, I am at a loose end for birds, 

 except for the courting displays of the crows, chasing 

 one another from one chimney-pot to another, and 

 the music of the owls which I hear every night as 



