intricate pattern of strongly-contrasted colours. Now the song
invariably begins with the harsh notes--the sounds which, at other
times, express alarm and other more or less painful emotions--and it
strikes me as a probable explanation that when the bird in the singing
season has been startled into uttering these harsh and grating sounds,
as when a stone is flung into the rushes, he is incapable of uttering
them only, but the singing notes they suggest and which he is in the
habit of uttering, follow automatically.

The spot where I observed this wee feathered fantasy, the tantalizing
sprite of the rushes, and where I soon ceased to see, hear, or think
about him, calls for a fuller description. On one side the wooded hill
sloped downward to the stream; on the other side spread the meadows
where the rooks came every day to feed, or to sit and stand about
motionless, looking like birds cut out of jet, scattered over about half
an acre of the grassy, level ground. Stout old pollard willows grew here
and there along the banks and were pleasant to see, this being the one
man-mutilated thing in nature which, to my mind, not infrequently gains
in beauty by the mutilation, so admirably does it fit into and harmonize
with the landscape. At one point there was a deep, nearly stagnant pool,
separated from the stream by a strip of wet, rushy ground, its still
dark surface covered with water-lilies, not yet in bloom. They were just
beginning to show their polished buds, shaped like snake's heads, above
the broad, oily leaves floating like islands on the surface. The stream
itself was, on my side, fringed with bulrushes and other aquatic plants;
on the opposite bank there were some large alders lifting their branches
above great masses of bramble and rose-briar, all together forming as
rich and beautiful a tangle as one could find even in the most luxuriant
of the wild, unkept hedges round the village. The briars especially
flourished wonderfully at this spot, climbing high and dropping their