6 RUSTIC SOUNDS 



hear an oboe actually played as a rustic 

 instrument one must go to Brittany, where it 

 accompanies the national bagpipe or ' biniou.' To a 

 reed-instrument player it was painful to see the 

 oboist bite a bit off his reed when the tone was not 

 to his liking I 



From this digression, originating in the whistle 

 cut from a horse-chestnut bough, I return to some 

 less artificial sounds. I must say a word about the 

 song of birds, but my knowledge of the subject is 

 but small. The most obvious of spring-time 

 sounds is the voice of the cuckoo. I confess to 

 liking the muttering chuckle which, in an un- 

 scientific mood, I have supposed to mean that an 

 egg has successfully been laid in a hedge-sparrow's 

 nest. But the cuckoo's "word in a minor third" 

 is always delightful. The bird is neither more nor 

 less of a foreigner than a willow-wren, yet he has, in 

 comparison to the wren's subdued chromatic 

 warble, a song so self-assertive, and a tone so unlike 

 our other birds, that one feels him an obvious 

 exotic, a foreigner of so glorious and dashing a 

 nature that one is grateful to him for singing among 

 flat ploughed lands and monotonous hedges. I 

 fancy the Welsh proverb, " Who would have 

 thought the cuckoo would sing on the turf-heaps of 

 the mountains," is a poetic reflexion of this thought. 



Of the nightingale I have nothing to say, except 

 to put on record a true remark of Sir Charles 

 Stanford's, viz., that he sings in a syncopated 

 rhythm. But, though I Hved in a nightingale land, 

 it is another bird that most clearly brings back to 

 me the country of my boyhood, I mean the night- 



