"Summer is a coming in,
Loudly sing cuckoo.
Groweth seed and bloweth mead,
And springeth the wood now.
Ewe bleateth after lamb,
Lowth after calf the cow,
Bullock starteth,
Buck now verteth,
Merry sing cuckoo.
Sing cuckoo,
Well singeth thou, cuckoo, cuckoo.
Nor cease thou ever now."
The Imp and the Elf love that little song and know it by heart. It was written by an old monk in the Spring-time years and years and years ago, and some of the words he used are difficult to understand now. Verteth is an old word meaning going on the green grass. Nearly all the other words I have made as much like our own as I can.
It is much easier to hear the cuckoo than to see him. He is a biggish grey gentleman with stripes across his middle, and he is horribly hard to notice unless we get quite close to him. He is very shy, and that makes it harder still. But sometimes when you hear him cry, cuckoo, cuckoo, if you are very quick indeed, you can see him flying across a field from hedge to hedge.
Mrs. Cuckoo is the laziest mother that ever was. The Elf thinks her perfectly horrid. I wonder if you know why? She is so gay and fond of flying about that she finds she has no time to build a nest or bring up her little ones as all good mothers do. So she just leaves her egg in someone else's home, and flies happily away, leaving the someone else to hatch the egg and bring up the little cuckoo. She often chooses quite small birds like the little greenfinches or even the sparrows. And when the young cuckoo comes tumbling out of his egg, instead of being kind and polite to the children to whom his nursery really belongs he just wriggles his big naked body under them and tumbles them out of the nest. That is why, though we love to hear the cuckoo, we think him rather a lazy bird, and his wife a very second-rate kind of mother.
When we come back from the walk on which we have heard the first cuckoo of the year, we really begin to long for the Summer. All the Spring signs have come. When we get back to my room, the Imp and the Elf sit on my table and swing their legs and say, "Brimstone butterfly, palm, catkins, daffodils, violets, primroses, blue-bells, and cuckoo; Summer is coming, don't you think, Ogre?" And I say yes. And they say, "Tell us what Summer is like, do, please." And I tell them, though they know already, and they sit on the table and wriggle at all the nicest parts of the telling, and we are all very happy indeed.
[II]
SUMMER
And what are the things we know the Summer by? Summer clothes say little girls, and big straw hats say boys. Well, and what do they mean but the heat? The Imp wears a huge straw hat and a loose holland overall but he goes about panting, and lies flat on the ground with the straw hat over his nose to keep the sun from burning his face. And the Elf wears an overall, too, and a pale blue calico sunbonnet over her curls. All the same she is often too hot to enjoy anything except sitting in the swing in the orchard and listening to fairy tales. And I, well, I am often too hot to tell fairy tales. For fairyland is a cool, comfortable place, and big, hot Ogres melt it away like an ice palace.