WAYSIDE NOTES FROM THE CONTINENT. 357 
song, indeed, although especially powerful and attractive, is not 
to be compared with that of the Nightingale or Blackcap in 
compass, quality, or sweetness. It is as the mingled clash and 
wild melody of barbaric music compared with the polished 
strains and cultivated periods of civilisation—the finished opera 
singer and the gipsy with her tambourine. I agree with Mr. 
Seebohm that ‘“‘it has great power, wonderful variety, and con- 
siderable compass, but it is singularly deficient in melody” 
(‘British Birds,’ vol. i., p. 382). In its habits it is bold and 
confident, and has little of the skulking, shelter-loving character 
of the leaf-warblers, preferring to sing in a conspicuous place, 
on the outer branch of an ornamental tree, or from the summit 
of a young cypress or fir. With a binocular I have watched it 
closely,—when under a brilliant sun the little creature for ten 
minutes at a time, with swollen throat and gaping beak (dis- 
playing the lemon-coloured fauces), has fairly quivered with the 
utterance of its own wild music,—astonished not a little that so 
small a bird should give forth notes which seemed more adapted 
to the powers of a Blackbird or Thrush. Gay little mocking- 
bird,—for justly art thou so called,—should ever I hear thy song 
again it will recall pleasant Pillnitz and its gardens, and the 
sunny vine-terraced slopes of the Saxon Elbe. The alarm-note 
is loud and discordant ; it reminded me something of that of the 
Lesser Whitethroat, but is much louder and more expressive of 
anger and annoyance. 
In the chateau gardens of Pillnitz I heard the four clear 
flute-like notes of the Golden Oriole (Pirol), but only once suc- 
ceeded, after much patient watching, in seeing the bird as it 
flew from the top of one high tree to another; a beautiful 
and attractive object in contrasting black and bright gamboge- 
yellow. 
In the same gardens, which are seven miles above Dresden, 
I saw the Spotted Flycatcher, Common and Lesser Whitethroats, 
Wood Wren, Garden Warbler, and Nightingale. The Lesser 
Whitethroat was particularly numerous ; on one occasion I was a 
witness to the extreme solicitude of the female in trying to draw 
attention from its young brood, three or four little grey dots fresh 
from the nest, perched in the shrubs; down dashed the mother, 
fluttering at my feet in the most helpless manner, first dragging 
one wing and then the other along the pathway, nor did she cease 
