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AFTER my long talk with the bird-catcher on June 24, and two more talks equally long on the two following days, I found that something of the charm the common had had for me was gone. It was not quite the same as formerly; even the sunshine had a something of conscious sadness in it which was like a shadow. Those merry little brown twitterers that frequently shot across the sky, looking small as insects in the wide blue expanse, and ever and anon dropped swiftly down like showers of aerolites, to lose themselves in the grass and herbage, or perch singing on the topmost dead twigs of a bush, now existed in constant imminent danger--not of that quick merciful destruction which Nature has for her weaklings, and for all that fail to reach her high standard; but of a worse fate, the prison life which is not Nature's ordinance, but one of the cunning larger Ape's abhorred inventions. In-
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BIRDS IN A VILLAGE 149
stead of taking my usual long strolls about the common I loitered once more in the village lanes and had my reward.
On the morning of June 27 I was out sauntering very indolently, thinking of nothing at all; for it was a surpassingly brilliant day, and the sunshine produced the effect of a warm, lucent, buoyant fluid, in which I seemed to float rather than walk--a celestial water, which, like the more ponderable and common sort, may sometimes be both felt and seen. The sensation of feeling it is somewhat similar to that experienced by a bather standing breast-deep in a dear, green, warm tropical sea, so charged with salt that it lifts him up; but to distinguish it with the eye, you must look away to a distance of some yards in an open unshaded place, when it will become visible as fine glinting lines, quivering and serpentining upwards, fountain-wise, from the surface. All at once I was startled by hearing the loud importunate hunger-call of a young cuckoo quite close to me. Moving softly up to the low hedge and peering over, I saw the bird perched on a long cross-stick, which had been put up in a cottage garden to hang clothes on; he was not