GILBERT WHITE AND SELBORNE 87 



paraphrasing — " a day of memories and sighs I conse- 

 crate to thee." 



I was glad to find the yellow-hammer common along 

 the hedgerows, for they are favourites of mine, and I 

 wasted a good deal of time watching them singing their 

 little hymns, like a sighing gust of wind among tall 

 grasses, beaks comically lifted 16 heaven and golden 

 heads shining in the sun. 



It is a thing to note that the chaffinch, greenfinch and 

 this canary of ours are the only native species who run 

 up a flourish at the end of their set song. The yellow- 

 hammer's phrase is, of course, a much more humdrum 

 affair than the chaffinch's : he does not put himself 

 out about rivals, and song to this comfortable body 

 sitting on the top of the hedge is what a pull of his 

 pipe is to the placid countryman perched on the top 

 bar of a gate. I doubt whether he prefers wild and 

 incult lands so much as is supposed. No, he likes to 

 take his ease on more cultivated uplands, upon the lower 

 branch of a tree or the summit of a thick hedge inter- 

 secting wide fields, where he can get a good view and 

 sibilate away to himself all the warm, long day. I 

 imagine he does not think much. It is an amiable 

 musing, and his reverie goes ambling over the different 

 objects that present themselves like a humble-bee from 

 flower to flower. Yellow-hammers fight, of course, in the 

 breeding season with as much fury and as little damage 

 as other birds, but I maintain that they are the most 

 absent-minded of all singing birds. 



Here, too, turtle doves had settled for the summer, 

 and their low, tremulous croodling or purring notes 

 accompanied me for a couple of miles. They have a 

 beautiful love-flight, sailing down to earth, with arched 

 wings and expanded white-barred tails, in a slanting 

 glide, that makes the curves of Milo's Venus look mean, 

 and flnishing up with a crack of the wings, like the 

 woodpigeon's. There were several pairs of lapwings 

 building in the fields, and I once turned aside to try 

 and find a nest,^ not because I cared much whether I 



' The perfect adaptation of the colouring of the egg to its 

 environment makes it a very difficult nest to find. And I think 



