never a voice replies. And so homewards, up through the meadow, hummocked with hay-cocks, and rough to the feet with short grass-stubble, from which the sleepy skylarks spring at every step: up to the elms that shade the garden, and on to the lawn. The bats wheel overhead, their soft wings crumpling as they turn their somersaults, but never a voice in the air, save sharp needle-points of sound, as flittermouse calls to flittermouse. Only from among the wheat, now here, now there, comes up the cry of the rail, Crake-crake.
It is a charming bird, sufficiently rare to make the seeing of it an event to remember all the summer; the finding of its nest a triumph. And then to see the young ones!—little black imps that run like spiders. Once only in my life could I have shot one. I was out with my gun, “strolling round” for the unconsidering evening rabbit, when all of a sudden from under my feet, in the furrow that separated the turnips from a patch of lucerne, up got a bird, and its slow, clumsy flight told me that it was a corn-crake, and for the sake of its little black imps I lowered my gun and let the poor mother go.
But the corn-crake has done crying, or has wandered away into another field beyond hearing, and here in the garden the voices of Nature soon reassert themselves, and, resonant above the rest, the blackcap is singing