A VILLAGE IN HAMPSHIRE 173 



Rates and Stock Exchanges, for these things pass and 

 dissolve in their own transitory ugliness, while bird and 

 flower announce and bring the mighty changes of a 

 planetary system. Like a debutante, he is at his best 

 on his first appearance, and cuckoo, willow-wren, wheat- 

 ear and blackcap are also near the top of the poll in 

 this respect. 



But the cuckoo's analogy is the closest, for he, too, 

 has but two strings to his bow, and as the year matures, 

 so fade the pristine charms of their voices, until a new 

 year restores them. In 1919, I heard the cuckoo's 

 " diminished third " for the first time on April 21st, 

 nine days after the first chiff-chaff, clear, full, pellucid 

 in the bright, cold air. I was lying in a small wood, 

 itself writing the first notes of the old song — " Sumer 

 is icumen in," when the cuckoo chimed in. " The 

 cuckoo is hoarse " — here might be a saying signifjdng 

 staleness, disillusion, age and decay when a man's life 

 has turned brown. A few days later I was sitting in the 

 evening under an elm when the cuckoo came to perch 

 on it. He hallowed there for a bit, and then set out 

 again languidly ^ chasing his mate, who dully awaited his 

 attentions on another tree some distance away. You 

 hear but you do not see the cuckoo at his best. A pair of 

 nightjars used to haunt the same ferny pasture towards 

 dusk, crouching lengthwise on a branch, and reeling or fly- 

 ing after one another like giant moths with "silent, search- 

 ing flight " and low call — cou-ee, cou-ee. Poor cuckoos, 

 poor Thomson to be a contemporary of Collins ! 



The willow-wren is rarely other than at his best, 

 and if there is anything in transmigration, I shall put 

 in for the willow-wren, so that I may listen to my own 

 strains from mom to eve. A few minutes after the 

 cuckoo, I heard a strain of about a dozen notes in the 

 thick undergrowth of this wood, some fifteen yards 

 away from me. It was the first blackcap of the season 

 (the garden garbler arrives several days later), and a 

 moment afterwards I saw the bird himself, creeping 

 up and down and to and fro among the interlaced twigs 



1 Though the cuckoo, whose physiological state is all askew — 

 he suffers from dyspepsia — ^is the most incontinent of birds. 



