130 SPRING. 



during which, though feeble, it is pleasant : it is made 

 with a smooth motion of the wings, and continues 

 after the bird has perched. 



The common pipit, or titling, (anthus pratensis) is 

 very generally diffused, and it is found in those bleak 

 and lonely mountain wastes where there are few other 

 birds to cheer the casual wanderer with a song. In 

 that season and time of the day, when all else are still 

 and quiet, the plaintive " tweet, tweet," of the pipit, as 

 it is scared from its little nest, under a bunch of heath, 

 or a tuft of grass, which has survived the winter, and 

 stands brown and rugged over their little home, has 

 often been as musical to our ear as the song of the 

 nightingale, upon richer but less bracing and healthful 

 places. 



When the cuckoo flies about, the pipit generally flies 

 along with it ; and has been for that reason accounted 

 a sort of lacquey or attendant upon it, providing it food 

 even when full grown, and waiting upon it, 



" As dwarfs upon knights errant do." 



So remarkable has been this following, that the 

 people of the north not only associate the cuckoo and 

 the pipit, or " the gowk and the titling," as they term 

 them, as inseparable, but make their apparently un- 

 natural union the source of sarcasm, when a small 

 man is following at the heels of a vain great one ; and 

 the word " gowk," which is with them another name 

 for folly, gives additional point to the moral sarcasm, 

 and glances a little at those naturalists who are, perhaps, 

 rather prone to give implicit credit to such tales, as 

 that of the unnatural attachment between those two 



