magpie, or mysterious moth-like goatsucker, or tropical kingfisher--more
interesting to watch. At twilight I had lingered at the woodside, also
in other likely places, and the goatsucker had failed to appear, gliding
and zig-zagging hither and thither on his dusky-mottled noiseless wings,
and now this still heavier disappointment was mine. I could not find the
wryneck. Those quiet grassy orchards, shut in by straggling hedges,
should have had him as a favoured summer guest. Creeper and nuthatch,
and starling and gem-like blue tit, found holes enough in the old trunks
to breed in. And yet I knew that, albeit not common, he was there; I
could not exactly say where, but somewhere on the other side of the next
hedge or field or orchard; for I heard his unmistakable cry, now on this
hand, now on that. Day after day I followed the voice, sometimes in my
eagerness forcing my way through a brambly hedge to emerge with
scratched hands and clothes torn, like one that had been set upon and
mauled by some savage animal of the cat kind; and still the quaint
figure eluded my vision.

At last I began to have doubts about the creature that emitted that
strange, penetrating call. First heard as a bird-call, and nothing more,
by degrees it grew more and more laugh-like--a long, far-reaching,
ringing laugh; not the laugh I should like to hear from any person I
take an interest in, but a laugh with all the gladness, unction, and
humanity gone out of it--a dry mechanical sound, as if a soulless,
lifeless, wind-instrument had laughed. It was very curious. Listening to
it day by day, something of the strange history of the being once but no
longer human, that uttered it grew up and took shape in my mind; for we
all have in us something of this mysterious faculty. It was no bird, no
wryneck, but a being that once, long, long, long ago, in that same
beautiful place, had been a village boy--a free, careless, glad-hearted
boy, like many another. But to this boy life was more than to others,