A VILLAGE IN HAMPSHIRE 179 



own. It is in the same notation as the yellow-hammer's, 

 but the quality of the song is superior, for the short 

 notes are louder and livelier, less droning, and each 

 one, though strung on one thread, more roundly enun- 

 ciated. The resemblance of the song to the lesser 

 whitethroat's has been justly noted. 



If the cirl bunting is thinly distributed, it is not at 

 all difficult to watch when found, being a very approach- 

 able bird. I have seen him perched on the post of a 

 barbed wire fence a few yards away from the nest with 

 unfledged young in it (as late as the 7th of August). 

 The nests of both the cirl and yellow bunting, with 

 their platform and shallow cup, are neat structures, 

 and very cleverly adjusted to the stems of bracken, 

 bramble, hazel, etc., but both species betray their nests 

 more readily than finches do. The buntings are, in fact, 

 mentally duller (as they are physically more sedentary) 

 than their finch relatives, and their defective intel- 

 ligence often undoes the work of a far more perfect 

 instinct. 



The tawny owl, again, can hardly be called a rarity, 

 except in districts infested by game-keepers, but it 

 is much more rarely seen than heard. I was wander- 

 ing among the beech hangars on a still, clear morning 

 in early spring, through innumerable smooth columns 

 supporting a delicate filigreed roof, painted in rich 

 purple, grass-green and pale blue, when I came in 

 sight of a large grove of yews, so densely planted that 

 the boughs interlaced overhead and the roots below. 

 They grew at every conceivable angle and bent and 

 knotted shape, clutching at one another in writhing 

 folds and angularities above and below like a Diirer 

 woodcut. It was an enchanted wood, full of grotesques 

 of a " kindly malice," like the work of a mediaeval 

 cathedral craftsman, dramatizing the stone. Through this 

 strange wood there came flying the wood-owl, its ghostly 

 familiar. The picture was phantasmal, a glimpse 

 into some queer world where trees expressed them- 

 selves in uncouth gestures and contortions, arguing 

 some mighty debate, not by sound but shape, and 

 the owl by its abnormal sensibility of flight completed 



