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sharp a tonic; unadulterated nature would startle and oppress me with its rude desolate aspect, no longer familiar. This softness of a well-cultivated earth, and unbroken verdure of foliage in many shades, and harmonious grouping and blending of floral hues, best suit my present enervated condition. I had, I imagine, a swarter skin and firmer flesh when I could ride all day over great summer-parched plains, where there was not a bush that would have afforded shelter to a mannikin, and think that I was having a pleasant journey. The cloudless sky and vertical sun--how intolerable they would now seem, and scorch my brain and fill my shut eyes with dancing flames! At present even this mild June sun is strong enough to make the old mulberry tree on the lawn appear grateful. It is an ancient, rough-barked tree, with wide branches, that droop downwards all round, and rest their terminal leaves on the sward; underneath it is a natural tent, or pavilion, with plenty of space to move about and sling a hammock in. Here, then, I have elected to spend the hottest hours of my one golden day, reading, dreaming, listening at intervals to the fine bird-sounds that have a.
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medicinal and restorative effect on the jarred and wounded sense.
From the elms hard by comes a subdued, airy prattle of a few sparrows. It is rather pleasant, something like a low accompaniment to the notes of the more tuneful birds; the murmurous music of a many-stringed instrument, forming the indistinct ground over which runs the bright embroidery of clear melodious singing.
This morning, while lying awake from four to five o'clock, I almost hated the sparrows, they were there in such multitudes, and so loud and persistent sounded their jangling through the open window. It set me thinking of the England of the future--of a time a hundred years hence, let us say--when there will remain with us only two representatives of feral life--the sparrow and the house-fly. Doubtless it will come, unless something happens; but, doubtless, it will not continue. It will still be necessary for a man to kill something in order to be happy; and the sportsmen of that time, like great Gambetta, in the past, will sit in the balconies, popping with pea-rifles at the sparrows until not one is left to twitter. Then will come the turn of the untamed
246 BIRDS IN TOWN AND VILLAGE