68 TIic Chiff-chaffs or Oven-builder. 



flowers, and sweet airs, and the music of a thousand other birds, 

 are coming. We revert to the time when, tracing the wood-side 

 or the bosky dingle in boyhood, we caught sight of its rounded 

 nest amongst the screening twigs of the low bush, and the 

 bleached bents of last year's grapes. AVe remember the 

 pleasure with which we examined its little circular entrance, and 

 discovered, in its downy interior, its store of delicate eggs, or 

 the living mass of feathery inmates, with their heads ranged 

 side by side and one behind another, with their twinkling eyes 

 and yellow-edged mouths. Many a time, as we have heard the 

 ever blithe note of chill-chall, as it stuck to its unambitious part 

 of the obscure woodland glade, we have wished that we could 

 maintain the same buoyant humour, the same thorough accep- 

 tance of the order of Providence for us. As Luther, in a 

 moment of despondency, when enemies were rife around him, 

 and calumny and wrong pursued him, heard the glad song of a 

 bird that came and sang on a bough before his window, we 

 have thanked God for the lesson of the never-drooping chill- 

 chall. The great world around never damps its joy with a 

 sense of its own insignificance; the active and often showy life 

 of man, the active and varied existence of even birds, which sweep 

 through the air in gay companies, never disturb its pleasure in 

 its little accustomed nook. It seems to express, in its two or 

 three simple notes, all the sentiment of indestructible content, 

 like the old woman's bird in the German story by Ludwig Tieck — • 



Alone in wood so gay, 



'Tis good to stay, 



Morrow like to-day 



For ever and aye ; 



Oh, I do love to stay 



Alone in wood so gay ! 



