BIRDS IN A VILLAGE 33 



rapidity with which it is enunciated ; once the song 

 begins it goes on swiftly to the finish, harsh and 

 melodious notes seeming to overlap and mingle, 

 the sounds forming, to speak in metaphor, a close 

 intricate pattern of strongly contrasted colours. 

 Now the song invariably begins with the harsh notes 

 — the sounds which, at other times, express alarm and 

 other more or less painful emotions — and it strikes 

 me as a probable explanation that when the bird 

 in the singing season has been startled into uttering 

 these harsh and grating sounds, as when a stone 

 is flung into the rushes, he is incapable of utter- 

 ing them only, but the singing notes they suggest, 

 and which he is in the habit of uttering, follow 

 automatically. 



The spot where I observed this wee feathered 

 fantasy, the tantalizing sprite of the rushes, and where 

 I soon ceased to see, hear, or think about him, calls 

 for a fuller description. On one side the wooded 

 hill sloped downward to the stream ; on the other 

 side spread the meadows where the rooks came every 

 day to feed, or to sit and stand about motionless, 

 looking like birds cut out of jet, scattered over about 

 half an acre of the grassy level ground. Stout old 

 pollard-willows grew here and there along the 

 banks and were pleasant to see, this being the one 

 man-mutilated thing in nature which, to my mind, 

 not infrequently gains in beauty by ths mutilation, 



