To Mountain Tarn 



wants everything to be itself. It is among those 

 negative characters which make a Scots lane. If 

 one were to come, it would be like having a sing- 

 ing bird in a house. Or as though one's mother 

 were suddenly to talk English, when her homely 

 doric was part of herself, and woven in with our 

 earliest recollections. All the poetry would be 

 gone. 



The man who sought to introduce the night- 

 ingale to the north made an experiment doubtful 

 in taste and futile in result. He put the eggs in 

 the nest of a northern bird. He wished to enrich 

 Scots lanes with the "joug joug," the glorious 

 crescendo. Say he did it here ; put them under 

 a hedge-warbler. The young birds would imitate 

 the hedge-warbler's lay and never sing the night- 

 ingale's song. As the foster-parents would not 

 migrate, the brood would stay along with them 

 and perish. Were the eggs put in the white- 

 throat's nest, the young would imitate the comic 

 ditty, instead of singing its own tragic lay. It 

 might migrate then, as a nightingale, with the 

 song of a whitethroat. Enough that there are 

 no nightingales nor other English warblers in the 

 Scots lanes. 



The remoteness of this no-man's-land, between 

 highway and highway, is the atmosphere of 

 nomad life. Tramps swarm from the aristocracy 

 with van and horse, through the philistines with 

 cart and donkey, to the plebs with a low dark 



J35 



