[Original]
[Original]
ON A FINE DAY
It's just like summer! That has been the refrain all day. When I have forgotten to say it, Jane has said it, or the bee expert has shouted it from the orchard with the freshness of a sudden and delighted discovery. There are some people of penurious emotions and speech, like the Drumtochty farmer in Ian Maclaren's story, who would disapprove of this iteration. They would find it wasteful and frivolous. They do not understand that we go on saying it over and over again, like the birds, for the sheer joy of saying it. Listen to that bullfinch in the coppice. There he goes skipping from branch to branch and twig to twig, and after each skip he pauses to say, “It's just like summer,” and from a neighbouring tree his mate twitters confirmation in perfect time. I've listened to them for half an hour and they've talked about nothing else.
In fact, all the birds are talking of nothing else, notably the great baritone who is at last in full song in his favourite chestnut below the paddock. For weeks he has been trying his scales a little doubtfully and tremulously, for he is a late starter, and likes the year to be well aired before he begins; but today he is going it like a fellow who knows his score so well that he could sing it in his sleep. And he, too, has only one theme: It's just like summer. He does not seem to say it to the world, but to himself, for he is a self-centred, contemplative singer, and not a conscious artist like his great tenor rival, the thrush, who seems never to forget the listening world.