14 
BIRDS IN A VILLAGE. 
cries have not been lost nor softened to sounds 
hardly to be distinguished from those that are 
emitted by way of song. 
By this time all the birds were breeding, some 
already breeding a second time. And now I began 
to suspect that they were not quite so undisturbed 
as the old dame had led me to believe ; that they 
had not found a paradise in the village after all. 
One morning, as I moved softly along the hedge in 
my nightingales' lane, all at once I heard, in the 
old grassy orchard to which it formed a boundary, 
swishing sounds of scuttling feet and half-sup- 
pressed exclamations of alarm; then a crashing 
through the hedge, and out, almost at m}^ feet, 
rushed and leaped and tumbled half a dozen 
urchins, who had suddenly been frightened from 
a birds'-nesting raid. Clothes torn ; hands and 
faces scratched with thorns ; hatless, their tow- 
coloured hair all disordered, or standing up like a 
white crest above their brown faces ; rounded eyes 
staring — what an extraordinarily wild appearance 
they had ! I was back in very old times, in the 
Britain of a thousand years before the coming of 
the Romans, and these were her young barbarians, 
learning their life's business in little things. 
No, the birds of the village were not undisturbed 
while breeding ; but happily the young savages 
