100 THE ROBINS AND CHATS. 



here, or that we leave our hearts at home and the ear 

 counts for little without the heart, I do not know ; but 

 it is a melancholy fact that there are many English- 

 men in this country on whom the music of its birds 

 appears to be wholly lost. I have been assured by a 

 man who had spent many years in India that the birds 

 here never sang, but only cawed, or shrieked, or jab- 

 bered. When I told him that skylarks, scarcely dis- 

 tinguishable from the " embodied joy " of English 

 fields, were singing every morning in the blue sky 

 above the very road by which he went to his work, 

 he scoffed at me. He had never heard a skylark in 

 India. There are of course more birds of song in this 

 country than in England, because there are more 

 birds altogether, and because the sun that cheers 

 them is brighter and the sky that inspires them more 

 blue. As to the quality of their songs, comparisons 

 are odious and unprofitable, because we cannot invest 

 Indian birds with the associations which endear those 

 of England. The voice of the Blackbird, heard in 

 bed in the cold silence of a spring morning, will sink 

 into one's heart in a way which is impossible in this 

 country, where we are not much given to lying in bed 

 of a morning, and where the cawing of crows, the 

 crowing of cocks, the yelping of pariah dogs, and a 

 medley of other unmusical noises come in at the open 

 windows with the first streak of dawn. Nevertheless, 

 if you do chance to be awake while the crows are still 

 asleep, the song of the Magpie Robin is rich and 

 sweet, and wonderfully powerful for so small a bird. 

 It will go on till eight or nine o'clock, but does not 

 sing, like the Nightingale, during the early hours of 

 the night, As the Magpie Robin perches on trees, so 



