ST. VALENTINE'S DAY 47 



have seen one another frequently during the winter. 

 The delicate little pearl-spotted tree-creepers have 

 both been with the tits all the winter, and so no 

 doubt assails their record for constancy. Their call 

 has grown longer, sweeter, and more cheerful, and 

 we are listening hard for the love-warble, a zither- 

 like tinkle so high and rare that scarcely one naturalist 

 in a hundred has heard it. The nut-hatches have 

 been sometimes together and sometimes widely 

 separate ; but now they are constantly together 

 again. It seemed to us that one day this week he 

 elaborately pretended to be a stranger, wooing, as a 

 new love, his mate of last year. He sat far apart on 

 an orchard bough, which, for this one occasion, he 

 straddled with his claws, instead of sitting in a line 

 with it, and he threw his head up in an entirely new 

 pose, and see-sawed his doleful song to the heartless 

 solitude. And she, coming near as the tits wandered 

 along their diurnal round, caught the song, no doubt 

 with a start of simulated astonishment, and came to 

 see what clever troubadour it could be that warbled so 

 sweetly. And now, perhaps, the tit band will see 

 her no more till next autumn. 



The fable, if it should be one, that the birds mate 

 on St. Valentine's Day must not be shattered. 

 Blessed be the man or woman who goes out on that 

 very day to see whether or no it is so. Any one 

 who does so is certain to see many sights to support 

 the theory. Some, but not all, will have been seen 

 some days earlier by careful observers who do not 

 wait upon dates. The lark is high in the sky, 

 gurgling out rich globules of song ; the thrush gives 

 his melodious recitative of " I know it, I know it " ; 



