THE YEAR’S HIGH NOON 
79 
scoundrels free. Both were absolutely shameless, for 
all that they were taken, as it were, red-handed—red¬ 
billed, perhaps, is better—and one of them pecked me. 
Yet, having in mind certain mummied feather corses 
taken up with the strawberry nets some summers since, 
I am more than half inclined to glory in my shame. 
The time of the silence of birds is upon us, and the 
monotonous sultry-sounding interjections of the sparrows 
fret the still air continually. They are for ever busy 
over some tiresome play or other that seems to provoke 
endless contradictions more or less acidulous, culminat¬ 
ing every now and again in impassioned dispute and 
noisy flurries of combat; when, the undignified scrim¬ 
mage over for the time being, they settle down into 
the comparative peacefulness of exchanging injuries at 
irregular intervals. They are, indeed, the feathered 
prototypes of the Bandar-log. The life of the garden 
is perceptibly duller without its music; “ the nightingale 
that in the branches sang,” the gallant and generous 
thrush, those sweetly garrulous elves, the titmice, in 
their liveries of misty blue and willow-green and silver, 
are heard no more. Only sometimes a little while 
before sunset the blackbird flings us forth scanty alms 
of song from his fastness among the thick leafage. 
Faintly they sound, those strange, rich cadences, and 
with a note of such remoteness as though the gates of 
ivory stood open for the moment to let the lost strain 
through. 
Later on you may hear the dry whit-whit of the 
robin as he bustles about within the deeper twilight of 
the shrubbery, preparing for the night as darkness 
