144 MAY 



rhetorical question. Some would stay, as past history 

 proves, if they were let to stay, and were as little dis 

 turbed in the apple orchards of Sussex as in the almond 

 orchards of Majorca. 



Another bird, with a name and appearance hardly less 

 attractive than the hoopoe s, is trying to nest here in the 

 same southern counties : the golden oriole. Again a 

 foreign memory or several foreign memories enhance the 

 desire to add him to our nesting species. For myself, I 

 grew most familiar with the sight of the bird round about 

 some dismantled German forts near the bank of the 

 Rhine. He was like a great specimen of our goldfinch, 

 almost the liveliest of all the small birds that delight our 

 eyes. The sun caught the gold bands of his wings as he 

 flew from side to side of the old battlements ; and any 

 poet in search of a symbol might have taken him, name 

 and all, nature and all, for a sign of the return of the 

 golden age to lands where no forts were any more 

 needed. Again and again in France I heard his flute-like 

 notes against the rumble of cannon. He is the only bird 

 that ever I heard which can challenge our own blackbird 

 in the quality of mellow tune. He almost equals him in 

 the quality of note, but, like the cuckoo, does not alto 

 gether avoid monotony. Sometimes he sings so loudly, 

 so iteratively that, in Calverley s phrase, the thing almost 

 becomes a bore. Yet most of us perhaps, at any rate in 

 early May, may say with Wordsworth, even of the cuckoo, 



And listen till I do beget 

 The golden time again. 



We could welcome the golden oriole in our golden 

 clime ; and we should almost certainly claim him as a 

 regular nester if those who knew of his presence were not 

 afflicted with the sacra fames auri, the accursed hunger 



