that no large tree near the cottage had been made choice of by a
song-thrush as a singing-stand during the early hours. The nearest tree
so favoured was on the further side of a field, so that when I woke at
half-past three or four o'clock, the shrill indefatigable voice came in
at the open window, softened by distance and washed by the dewy
atmosphere to greater purity. Throstle and skylark to be admired must be
heard at a distance. But at that early hour when I sat by the open
window, the cuckoo's call was the commonest sound; the birds were
everywhere, bird answering bird far and near, so persistently repeating
their double note that this sound, which is in character unlike any
other sound in nature, which one so listens and longs to hear in spring,
lost its old mystery and charm, and became of no more account than the
cackle of the poultry-yard. It was the cuckoo's village; sometimes three
or four birds in hot pursuit of each other would dash through the trees
that lined the further side of the lane and alight on that small tree at
the gate which the nightingale was accustomed to visit later in the day.

Other birds that kept themselves very much out of sight during most of
the time also came to the same small tree at that early hour. It was
regularly visited, and its thin bole industriously examined, by the
nuthatch and the quaint little mouse-like creeper. Doubtless they
imagined that five o'clock was too early for heavy human creatures to be
awake, and were either ignorant of my presence or thought proper to
ignore it.

But where, during the days when the vociferous cuckoo, with hoarse
chuckle and dissyllabic call and wild bubbling cry was so much with
us--where, in this period of many pleasant noises was the cuckoo's mate,
or maid, or messenger, the quaint and beautiful wryneck? There are few
British birds, perhaps not one--not even the crafty black and white