76 
BIRDS IN A VILLAGE. 
The village was his metropolis, just as London is 
ours — and the sparrows ; its lanes were his streets, 
its hedores and elm trees his cottao^e rows and tall 
stately mansions and public buildings. We fre- 
quently find the predominancy of one species some- 
what wearisome. Speaking for myself, there are 
songsters that are best appreciated when they are 
limited in numbers and keep their distance; but 
of the familiar, unambitious strains of swallow, 
robin, and wren I never tire, nor, during these 
days, could I have too much of the greenfinch, 
low as he ranks amono- British melodists. Tastes 
difier ; that is a point on which we are all agreed, 
and every one of us, even the humblest, is per- 
mitted to have his own preferences. Still, after 
re-reading Wordsworth's lines to the "Green 
Linnet," it is curious, to say the least of it, to 
turn to some prose-writer — an authority on birds, 
perhaps — to find that this species, whose music 
so charmed the poet, has for its only song a 
monotonous croak, which it repeats at short 
intervals for hours without the slightest variation 
— a dismal sound which harmonizes with no other 
sound in nature, and suggests nothing but heat 
and weariness, and is of all natural sounds the 
most irritating. To this writer, then — and there 
are others to keep him in countenance — the green- 
finch ranks lower than the lowest. One can only 
