208 THE RECTORY AND ITS BIRDS 



itself and its definition to the attention of the 

 distinguished author of the Dictionary of English 

 Dialects, which is now in course of coming out. 

 He may not have heard of the one, and he will 

 certainly not be much the wiser for the other. 



It was with a touch of local satisfaction or 

 patriotism, not altogether dissimilar to that of "old 

 John," that Gilbert White himself remarked that 

 the night-jars of Selborne, though separated from 

 Portsmouth by half the county of Hampshire, 

 used often to strike up their evening "whirr" at 

 the sound of the Portsmouth evening gun. Some 

 of the inhabitants of Broadmayne, a village near 

 Stafford so I am informed by its rector, the Rev. 

 G. W. Butler go further even than those of Mel- 

 combe, and believing, to this day, in the hibernation 

 of the cuckoo, say that it is at Wareham fair that 

 "the cuckoo wakes up and buys his whistle." One 

 local legend tells how, when, once upon a time, a 

 large log of wood had been thrown upon the dogs 

 of a yule fire, the cry of "cuckoo," as though from a 

 martyr in the flames of Smithfield, burst from a bird 

 who was sleeping away the chill hours of winter 

 within it, and suddenly found himself too warm ; 

 while another tells of an encaged cuckoo which fell 

 asleep, at the time of migration, in a corner of his 



