246 THE LAND'S END 



One bright spring day I was with him, pacing his 

 garden walk, discussing a variety of important matters 

 relating to man's spiritual nature, and so forth, when 

 by and by we drifted into other themes wild nature, 

 and then wild bird life. " There is," he said, " one 

 curious thing about birds in which they differ from 

 other creatures and which makes them a little more 

 puzzling to a man with just the ordinary knowledge 

 of nature. They have wings to carry them about 

 and they roam from place to place so that at any 

 moment a man may be confronted with a bird of a 

 perfectly unfamiliar appearance. Or he may hear a 

 cry or song which he has never heard before, and in 

 such a case he can only say that the bird must be a 

 stranger in that locality a wanderer from some dis- 

 tant place. But one would always like to know what 

 the bird is ; it adds to the interest, and I have very 

 often wished when seeing or hearing some such strange 

 bird that some one like yourself, with an intimate 

 knowledge of all the species in our country, had been 

 with me to satisfy my curiosity.'* 



Just as he was finishing a chaffinch flew down and 

 vanished into the dense foliage of a young horse- 

 chestnut tree growing a dozen yards from where we 

 stood, and no sooner had it come down than it burst 

 out in its familiar loud ringing lyric. 



He started round and held up his hand. " There ! " 

 he exclaimed when the bird ended his song. " A case 

 in point ! Now can you tell me what bird was that?" 



" A chaffinch," I said. 



He looked sharply, almost resentfully, at me, think- 



