io8 SURREY SCENES 



As for the date of his coming, that 1 is as uncertain as 

 the arrival of the season itself. " He did use to come 

 on Wareham Fair," said a Dorsetshire labourer the 

 other day ; " but now he seems to come just when 

 he likes." 



But except as a weather-sign, the writer fails to find 

 one redeeming point in the life of the English cuckoo ; 

 and if the cuckoo-lore of the Old World, over which 

 it roams from Lapland to the Equator, and from 

 Connaught to Kamschatka, could be compared, it 

 should bear out this conclusion. He is a " vagrom 

 man," as Dogberry would say : a vulgarian, a dis- 

 reputable parasite. Yet he is in some ways an inter- 

 esting creature, and the world has always a fondness for 

 interesting scamps. He is an impostor so complete, 

 that the mere catalogue of his deceptions rouses 

 curiosity. From the egg, which imitates in size and 

 colour that of the harmless skylark, to the full and 

 fraudulent plumage of maturity, which clothes the 

 indolent cuckoo in the garb of the fierce and active 

 sparrow-hawk, he lives for ever under false colours. 

 Though he looks like a hawk, he is an insect-eater ; 

 he has two toes pointing forward and two backward, 

 like a woodpecker ; but he cannot climb. He is 

 aVropyos, devoid of natural affection ; and never 

 works for his wife, any more than she does for her 

 children. There was once a cuckoo in Germany who 

 hatched her own eggs ; and another has been known 

 to feed its young one, when the foster-mother, a hedge- 

 sparrow, had been killed. But these instances are rare 



