COUNTRY SOUNDS 109 
pleasant trill in it, which the male raises to a higher 
power in spring; among the furze-bushes beside 
the dry wall the stonechats seem to “chap” the 
stones together; the peewits cry plaintively from 
the farmer’s fields; as we take a short cut across 
the heathery “ preserve,’’ grouse after grouse pro- 
claims our trespass with a ridiculously silly cachin- 
nation kok-kok-kok; but best of all we like “the 
moan of doves from immemorial elms.” 
It is only in manuals of psychology that we get 
pure sensations and pigeon-holed perceptions, for 
around all the country-sounds that have become 
dear to us there have gathered memories, associa- 
tions, ideas, and we hear with more than the hearing 
of the ear. There are wonderful “ wireless ” mes- 
sages which the imagination can catch. As we walk 
at nightfall across the common, noiselessly we think, 
a dog barks just once or twice from a cottage door 
half a mile away, and then, before the utter quietness 
is resumed, we hear the children turn in bed, the 
click-clack of their mother’s knitting-needles, the 
rustle of the newspaper which the shepherd is read- 
ing by the fireside; and we see back into prehistoric 
times when man, whose life depended on recogniz- 
ing and interpreting sounds, began to evolve the first 
cousin of a wolf into the trusty guardian of his herds 
and hearth. So is it with the other familiar country 
sounds; we hear not them alone, but what they are 
symbols and sympathetic echoes of; for man is 
ever reading himself into the so-called outer world. 
It is his particular magic to hear in the lark’s 
