184 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



to dispute his fair, or chases her in wild circles and 

 headlong dives through the air. 



But these standards read rather more absolutely 

 than I intend them. The human mood and attitude 

 so constantly alter values that the significance of a 

 bird's action shifts in proportion, and precisely the 

 same spectacle appeals to the mind one day and the 

 eye alone on another. One warm day in late April 

 I was lying upon a hillside overlooking a bountiful 

 stretch of woodland and pasture with the rounded 

 curves of the Sussex Downs rising beyond it. Here 

 one could have lain thoughtless, silent and absorbed 

 for hours, in a serenity gradually enfolding one as the 

 sea covers a rock. One begins to find out what it feels 

 like to be a tree. Then suddenly a yaffle flew up right 

 from the valley, passed over my head and alighted on 

 a tree fifty yards away. The open view I had of the 

 bird, the transition from repose and immobility to 

 the most rhythmic of all movements flight gave me 

 the sensation of rushing through the air more than 

 I have ever felt it before, while the nature of the 

 yaffle's flight, its curving, sweeping lines, the pauses 

 in the wing-beats, the drop and recovery all contri- 

 buted to snatching me from the ground. Had it 

 been a wood-pigeon, and had I seen this flight in any 

 other confluence of conditions, I should have stayed 

 where I was. Yet a yaffle on any other day would 

 fly as fast. 



There is one bird whose best is distinctly his worst 

 in all circumstances, and that is the corn-bunting, 

 largest of his family, and commoner in the valleys than 

 the yellow-bunting, while on the uplands the positions 

 were reversed. The song has been compared with 

 breaking glass, a rattling chain, the alarm-notes of 

 the skylark, the wheezing in the pipes of an aged rustic, 

 and the squeezing of pebbles together. I defer to these 

 just and inventive similes, and have only to add that, 

 unlike the yellow-bunting, who demands both bread 

 and cheese, unlike the cirl, who leaves out the cheese, 

 the corn leaves out the bread. " Quick, quick, cheese ! " 

 he says, and the style, semi-articulate, slurred, thickened 



