84 The Gamekeeper at Home. 



favourite resort of that bird. The reduplication of 

 the liquid notes, as they travelled to and fro, was 

 peculiarly pleasant : the water, perhaps, lending, like 

 a sounding-board, a fulness and roundness to her 

 song. She might possibly have fancied that another 

 bird was answering ; certainly she ' cried ' much 

 longer there than in other places. Morning after 

 morning, and about the same time — eleven o'clock — 

 a cuckoo sang in that group of trees, from noting 

 which I was led to think that perhaps the cuckoo, 

 though apparently wandering aimlessly about, really 

 has more method and regularity in her habits than 

 would seem. 



Country people will have it that cuckoos are 

 growing scarcer every year, and do not come in the 

 numbers they formerly did ; and, whether it be the 

 chance of unfavourable seasons or other causes, it is 

 certainly the fact in some localities. I recollect 

 seeing as many as four at once in a tall elm — a tree 

 they love — all crying and gurgling, as it were, in the 

 throat together ; this was some years since, and that 

 district is now much less frequented by these birds. 



There was a superstition that where or in what- 

 ever condition you happened to be when you heard 

 the cuckoo the first time in the spring, so you would 

 remain for the next twelvemonth : for which reason it 



