neighbouring tree (for these meadows are dotted with timber like a
park), began to echo my lovely little girl, 'cuckoo! cuckoo!' I
have a prejudice very unpastoral and unpoetical (but I cannot help
it, I have many such) against this 'harbinger of spring.' His note
is so monotonous, so melancholy; and then the boys mimic him; one
hears 'cuckoo! cuckoo!' in dirty streets, amongst smoky houses, and
the bird is hated for faults not his own. But prejudices of taste,
likings and dislikings, are not always vanquishable by reason; so,
to escape the serenade from the tree, which promised to be of
considerable duration (when once that eternal song begins, on it
goes ticking like a clock)--to escape that noise I determined to
excite another, and challenged Lizzy to a cowslip-gathering; a trial
of skill and speed, to see which should soonest fill her basket. My
stratagem succeeded completely. What scrambling, what shouting,
what glee from Lizzy! twenty cuckoos might have sung unheard whilst
she was pulling her own flowers, and stealing mine, and laughing,
screaming, and talking through all.

At last the baskets were filled, and Lizzy declared victor: and
down we sat, on the brink of the stream, under a spreading hawthorn,
just disclosing its own pearly buds, and surrounded with the rich
and enamelled flowers of the wild hyacinth, blue and white, to make
our cowslip-ball. Every one knows the process: to nip off the tuft
of flowerets just below the top of the stalk, and hang each cluster
nicely balanced across a riband, till you have a long string like a
garland; then to press them closely together, and tie them tightly
up. We went on very prosperously, CONSIDERING; as people say of a
young lady's drawing, or a Frenchman's English, or a woman's
tragedy, or of the poor little dwarf who works without fingers, or
the ingenious sailor who writes with his toes, or generally of any