90 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



world — about the invisible they bothered themselves 

 little — seemed to transfer the beauty not only to their 

 numbers, but their personalities. 



So I left the waste and set off down the pretty 

 village street for the Plestor, the little square with the 

 sycamore which has supplanted " the vast oak, the 

 delight of young and old," overturned by a tempest in 

 1703. Thence into the churchyard, keeping the eyes 

 resolutely turned away from " The Wakes," which now 

 looks like my suburban residence in London. Happily, 

 there still remain the churchyard and the massy- 

 girthed yew and the cypresses and the squat, square 

 tower of the church, which no rich man has yet thrown 

 down to rear a mighty fane to his Sovereign God. Still, 

 too, hovers the blessed spirit of the place which hides 

 the small leaning gravestone of Gilbert White with 

 long, waving grasses. That stone, with " G.W." upon 

 it and the dates of his birth and death, is still inviolate, 

 and no progressive person has stood over it and ex- 

 claimed : " What needs my Gilbert for his honoured 

 bones ? " — while the affrighted familiars of the spirit 

 shrieked and departed. But all the screams I heard 

 were the modulated ones of the greenfinches, varied 

 with their fluttering song. The greenfinch, indeed, the 

 olive bird with a slash of gold flaming above the flank 

 when the wings are closed, was the commonest bird 

 in the churchyard, and his lively ripple (greenfinches 

 are great talkers) went breaking over the boughs sway- 

 ing in the breeze. In the big sycamore, where, Mr. 

 Hudson tells us, he saw the cirl bunting (I saw him 

 on the way home), a daw was building, and the hole 

 was so small that the female took half a minute to 

 squeeze herself through. Lower down on the same 

 tree a fly-catcher had its perch, and repeatedly swimg 

 off it to round up a fly in a sweeping curve and return. 

 In White's time twelve pairs of swifts circled the tower 

 in their evening revels. When Mr. Hudson went to 

 Selborne it was eight, and I saw but two, though this 

 year (1919) swifts outnumbered both swallows and 

 house-martins put together. It made me uncomfort- 

 able to think what White would feel about our dwindling 



