While I lingered away the latter half of May in Scotland, and the first half of June in northern England, and finally in London, intent on seeing the land leisurely and as the mood suited, the thought never occurred to me that I was in danger of missing one of the chief pleasures I had promised myself in crossing the Atlantic, namely, the hearing of the song of the nightingale. Hence, when on the 17th of June I found myself down among the copses near Hazlemere, on the borders of Surrey and Sussex, and was told by the old farmer, to whose house I had been recommended by friends in London, that I was too late, that the season of the nightingale was over, I was a good deal disturbed.
"I think she be done singing now, sir; I ain't heered her in some time, sir," said my farmer, as we sat down to get acquainted over a mug of the hardest cider I ever attempted to drink.
"Too late!" I said in deep chagrin, "and I might have been here weeks ago."
"Yeas, sir, she be done now; May is the time to hear her. The cuckoo is done too, sir; and you
don't hear the nightingale after the cuckoo is gone, sir."
(The country people in this part of England sir one at the end of every sentence, and talk with an indescribable drawl.)
But I had heard a cuckoo that very afternoon, and I took heart from the fact. I afterward learned that the country people everywhere associate these two birds in this way; you will not hear the one after the other has ceased. But I heard the cuckoo almost daily till the middle of July. Matthew Arnold reflects the popular opinion when in one of his poems ("Thyrsis") he makes the cuckoo say in early June,—
"The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I!"
The explanation is to be found in Shakespeare, who says,—
"The cuckoo is in June