pilgrims, along the broad highways of massacre, walled in, as it were, with disaster on either side, running the gauntlet of ambush and open warfare all along the line. The myriads that perish before they reach us are beyond computation. But the survivors rear new broods, the gaps by death are all filled by birth, and off they go again once more, giving hostages to pitiless calamity, and strewing afresh in Autumn the tracks of Spring with countless corpses. But I did not tell the child this. She would have said the birds were “stupid,” and thought, perhaps, the less of them and the worse.
So before we had got home I told her that “perhaps” the reason why the birds all came to England to build their nests and lay their eggs here, was because they wanted their young ones to learn the best of manners and to go to the best of bird-schools. “Some of these birds come from countries where the people are called savages, because their behaviour is shocking, and they have no schools, and so (perhaps) the birds come here because they want the little ones to be nicely brought up.”
It is not much of a reason, I confess. It will not probably satisfy Professor Ptthmllnsprts. But it satisfied my small companion, for she approved the conduct of the old birds. And when you can satisfy a child on a point that you can not satisfy a grown-up person on, you have got some way, depend upon it, towards the truth. There must be some advantage in the migration of birds, or it would not happen with such pitiless regularity. But it does not look as if the advantage were on the side of the birds.
And now to get back to my thrush. When this bird was first identified with both throstle and “mavis” is a pretty point that some bird-lover might care to follow out. It certainly is quite of modern date, for I find Spenser making the mavis as one bird “reply” to the thrush as another; in poet-laureate Skelton’s poem the “threstill” is contrasted with the mavis—“the threstill with her warblynge, the mavis with her whistell”—and quite as explicitly in Gascoigne. Harrison, again, clearly distinguishes the two as being different birds. So that the thrush-throstle-mavis was not a single bird before, at any rate, the middle of the seventeenth century. And for myself, I should not be surprised if it were found on inquiry that the mavis was originally the blackbird, and that it is an old English word, and not a Scotch one, any more than “merle.” At any rate, this much is certain, that Chaucer’s English was “a well of English undefiled”; and he sings both of mavis and of merle as of birds that he knew. And in Chaucer’s day, Scotland was a fearsome region situated “in foreign parts,” and inhabited by a race of human beings who only differed from Irish in being worse. And Chaucer did not speak Scotch. But, as I have said, the origin of our bird-and-beast names is a very pretty subject still awaiting the philological naturalist, and when that curious person is forthcoming he ought to make his subject one of a very curious and lasting interest.
Meanwhile the thrush is with us, year in year out, singing whenever it can, and persecuting snails in the intervals. For though it is fond of worms, and dotes on the berries of the mountain-ash, it has a perfect passion for snails. If a thrush is in a bush in a garden, and you throw a snail on to the garden path close by it, the thrush is promptly out. The sound of the shell on the gravel attracts it at once, for it is familiar with it. In winter, when the snails have all cuddled up together in some corner behind the flower-pots, or between the pear-tree stem and the wall, the thrush finds them out, and so long as a snail remains the thrush will stop. Nor is it a shy bird when thus engaged, for if you come suddenly upon it, walking quietly on the snow, it will hop off with its victim a little way and begin again tapping the poor snail upon a stone, till the little householder is left without a wall to protect it, and is swallowed. And if a thrush finds a secluded corner with a convenient stone there, it always takes its snails to the same spot, building up in its own way a little shell-midden, like those which prehistoric man has left us, of oyster-shells and clams, to puzzle over. When driven by stress of weather to the seashore, it treats the hard-shelled whelks just as it treated the garden-snails, and by persistent rapping on the rocks, arrives at its food.
By nest, and, above all, by song, this bird is probably
