206 THE RECTORY AND ITS BIRDS 



with the same overpowering force and for the same 

 duration. Then they rise in one vast body, circle 

 round a little, and finally move off, each in his 

 proper flock, to their happy and widely scattered 

 hunting-grounds. The whole is, perhaps, one of the 

 most interesting sights that birds can give us, 

 within the limits of the British Islands. 



The swallow is, with the one exception of the 

 cuckoo, the most eagerly awaited and the most 

 warmly welcomed of all the harbingers of spring. 

 " Have you seen the swallow?" and " Have you 

 heard the cuckoo ? " are the two questions which, 

 perhaps, pass the lips of the labourer, nay, even of 

 the stay-at-home and often unobservant labourer's 

 wife, more frequently than any other, in the interval 

 between the ;th and the i;th of April. "Well, 

 John," said the clergyman of Bingham's Melcombe, 

 Charles Bingham, many years ago, to his old gardener 

 and groom combined, a man who had never lived 

 away from his native village, eleven miles from any 

 town, and, for that reason, knew all the better the 

 thoughts and ways of the villagers, and whose dialect 

 was "a well of Dorset undefiled " " Well, John, 

 have you heard the cuckoo yet?" "Guckoo?" 

 replied John. " We do never know now when we 

 shall hear hun." "How's that?' 1 said his master. 



