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musical sounds since April may, when July comes, devour a certain number of cherries. Nor is even this plea needed. If it is innocent for the lower creatures to prey upon one another, it cannot be less innocent for man to destroy them indiscriminately, if it gives him any pleasure to do so. It is idle to go into such subtle questions with those who have the power to destroy; if their hands are to be restrained it is not by appealing to feelings which they do not possess, but to their lower natures--to their greed and their cunning. For the rest of us, for all who have conquered or outgrown the killing instinct, the impartiality that pets nothing and persecutes nothing is doubtless man's proper attitude towards the inferior animals; a godlike benevolent neutrality; a keen and kindly interest in every form of life, with indifference as to its ultimate destiny; the softness which does no wrong with the hardness that sees no wrong done.
To return to the birds. The starlings have kissed like lovers, and fluttered up vertically on their short wings, trying to stream like eagles, only to return to the trees once more and sit there chattering pleasant nothings; at intervals
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throwing out those soft, round, modulated whistled notes, just as an idle cigarette-smoker blows rings of blue smoke from his lips; and now they have flown away to the fields so that I can listen to the others.
A thrush is making music on a tall tree beyond the garden hedge, and I am more grateful for the distance that divides us than for the song; for, just now, he does not sing so well as sometimes of an evening, when he is most fluent, and a listener, deceived by his sweetness and melody, writes to the papers to say that he has heard the nightingale. Just now his song is scrappy, composed of phrases that follow no order and do not fit or harmonize, and is like a poor imitation of an inferior mocking-bird's song.
Between the scraps of loud thrush-music I listen to catch the thin, somewhat reedy sound of a yellow-hammer singing in the middle of the adjoining grassy field. It comes well from the open expanse of purpling grass, and reminds me of a favourite grasshopper in a distant sunny land. O happy grasshopper! singing all day in the trees and tall herbage, in a country where every village urchin is not sent afield to "study natural his-
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