A VILLAGE IN HAMPSHIRE 185 



and in the rough, is exactly the bird. One morning 

 I watched a corn-bunting having a mud bath in the 

 road, fifteen paces from where I stood, plainly visible 

 to him. There he was in his chequered and untidy 

 plumage of various shades of brown, gravely standing 

 on his chest, with his beak planted in the water like 

 a walking-stick. He then solemnly elevated his tail, 

 proceeded to some perfimctory flutterings of the wings, 

 stopped and had a look round, and went on with his 

 ablutions again. At the end of this ceremonious rite, 

 this consequential purification, only his breast was wet, 

 and he looked just as slatternly and dishevelled as he 

 did at the beginning. Thus he goes muddling dowdily 

 through life, wearing it like an ill-fitting coat, and 

 always indolent. I love him for it, and how could 

 Mr. Hudson have the heartlessness to write an apology 

 for this best of all companions on a grey day ? 



I have nothing to say of the nightingale in this 

 district, for all I heard of his performances that year 

 was a croak, and that was over the Surrey border. 

 The bird was certainly rare in all the Southern Counties 

 in 1919, and the blizzard in early April must have 

 caused a heavy mortality among them. 



I must, however, relate my experience with nightin- 

 gales the following year, and not in Hampshire, but 

 at Boar's Hill near Oxford, because the nightingale is 

 extremely capricious in the opportunities he gives you 

 for seeing or hearing him at his best, and I know no 

 other native singer, with the possible exception of the 

 blackbird, who is so variable in the quality of his song. 

 I feel diffident of disagreeing with Mr. Hudson, with his 

 divine intuition into the life of the bird and his wonderful 

 ear for bird music, but all the same I cannot see eye to 

 eye with him or listen ear to ear, when he says that the 

 nightingale of the poets is a very different thing from 

 the nightingale of reality. I have no doubt that 

 he is by far the finest warbler we possess, perhaps, 

 with the exception of the white-banded and other less 

 superb species of mocking-bird, the finest warbler in the 

 world. 



The song lacks tenderness — ^parts of it are a pelting 



