58 THE ALPS IN JUNE. 



for his nesting-place, the very highest bit of real cover, 

 consisting only of stunted bushes, that he can find iij all 

 this district. Here, too, we are not unlikely to find a flock 

 of Alpine Choughs ; noisy chattering birds, with yellow beaks, 

 long and thin and with a downward curve ; their legs are 

 bright red and their plumage a bright and glossy black. 

 The Cornish Chough {Pyrrhocorax graculus, Linn.), is also 

 found in the Alps, but it is much less common ; it is a larger 

 bird, and has a red bill instead of a yeUow one. The Alpine 

 Chough is the characteristic corvus of the Alps, as it is also of 

 the Apennines, and its lively chatter, breaking suddenly on 

 vast and silent solitudes, recalls to memory the familiar 

 jackdaw we left behind us in the Broad Walk at Oxford, 

 or in the tower of our old village church. 



But as I think of those delicious pastures, nestling under 

 the solemn precipices, and studded in June with gentians, 

 primulas, anemones, where each breath of crystal air is laden 

 with the aromatic scent of Alpine herbage, I seem to hear 

 one favourite song resounding far and near — a song given high 

 in air, and often by an invisible singer ; for so huge is the mass 

 of mountain around us, that he seldom projects himself against 

 the sky in his flight, and may well escape the quickest eye. 

 But he is never many minutes together on the wing, and 

 will soon descend to perch on some prominent object, the very 

 top twig of a pine, or a bit of rock amid the Alpine roses — 



Those quivering wings composed, that music still. 



His nest is not far ofi', and may sometimes be stumbled on in 



