66 THE BOOK OF THE OPEN AIR 



The earth smells sweet with growth, grey-scarred Somersetshire hills, the 



the stars gleam soft and large, the sky last pairs have found fair harbourage 



is velvety and dark, moths' wings are in the thickets, and they need the 



abroad in the air ; and then, out of road no more. They are birds of a 



the silence and solitude of the garden, delicate choice in summer climate and 



from some well-known corner made surroundings, and shun, perhaps, not 



half mysterious as the sudden throne only the later and sharper summers 



of song, the night is filled with the of the north, but even in the milder 



strong and passionate prelude of the west, some influence, unknown to us, 



nightingales of yet another spring. of its profuser annual rainfall. In 



Unlike many of the other birds of any case, it seems always strange 



summer, which pour into the country that there are no nightingales to haunt 



by routes which cross the wider spaces the combes and vales of the western 



of the Channel, the nightingale enters land, when May brings in its cloudy 



England at the extreme south-east, nights of incense, and the mind 



and seems to distribute itself west- recalls how their song is throbbing 



ward and northward in gradually under the hills, away between the 



decreasing numbers. So far, for in- Virgin and the Plough, where 



stance, to the west as the Gloucester- the streams flow eastward to the 



shire and Berkshire borderland, among sea. 



the streams that make the Thames, More than of most other birds, the 

 its voice resounds everywhere in the haunts of the nightingale are exactly 

 mid-May copses; but thirty miles those clean, deep, flowery thickets, 

 still further to westwards, beyond the where the sylvan life of spring unfolds 

 high Cotswold scarp, it is far scarcer itself most prodigally and keenly in 

 and more fitful in its coming, so that the six weeks from late April to early 

 a single singing nightingale will draw June, that are the season of the night- 

 half a country town to hear it, in the ingale's song. The nightingale, like 

 early summer evenings of a year most others of the smaller birds, avoids 

 when it appears. From their landing- the dark heart of the woods, and clings 

 place upon the Kentish shore, the to the broken borderland of sunlight 

 birds spread fan-wise, thinning as they and shadow ; and it shuns also, like 

 go till by the time that they have most of its kindred in the tribe of 

 reached Trent and Severn and the summer warblers, the harsh, enamelled 



