More Tales of the Birds

by W. Warde Fowler

“I am like Dr. and Mrs. Jackson,” he would say: “I poke and pry into all the corners of the old place, and when I find anything that catches my eye I carry it home and hide it away. And really I don’t know that my treasures will ever come to light, any more than the Doctor’s up there in the tower.”

Those who were ever admitted to his study, as I sometimes was in my college vacations, knew that there was great store of hidden treasure there; and now and again he would talk to me of the church and its monuments, of the manor and its copyholds, of furlongs and virgates and courts leet and courts baron, and many other things for which I cared little, though I listened to please him, and left him well pleased myself.

But at other times, and chiefly on those dim still days of autumn when a mist is apt to hang over men’s hearts as over field and woodland, he would walk up and down his garden path ‘talking to hisself in furrin tongues’ as our old sexton expressed it, who heard him as he dug a grave in the adjoining churchyard. Once or twice I heard him myself, when I happened to be within range of his gentle voice. Sometimes it was Greek, and then I could not easily follow it. Once I heard “Sed neque Medorum silvæ,” and could just catch sight of him pausing to look round at the grey fields as he slowly added line to line of that immortal song. And there were single lines which he would repeat again and again, cherishing them with tenderness like old jewels, and doubtless seeing many a sparkle in them that I could not, as he turned them over and over. And there were bits of Latin from some author unknown to me then, known to me later as the unknown author of the “De Imitatione”: “Unde coronabitur patientia tua, si nihil adversi occurrerit;” or, “Nimis avide consolationem quæris.”

At one time he took long walks or rides, and coming in after dark to dinner, would spend the evening in “logging” (as he called it) all that he had seen or heard. But when I knew him he was getting old, and the rambles were growing shorter: it was not often that he was seen beyond the village. He would go up to the village shop of afternoons, where a chair was always set for him, and talk to the people as they came in on various errands. But his old friends died off one by one: he followed them to the churchyard, and would stand with bare head there, listening to the Vicar reading the prayers, while Dr. and Mrs. Jackson looked down on the scene from the tower as usual. And really it seemed as if they would soon be the only old friends left to him.

For the greater part of the year they were his companions most of the day: they became a part of his life, and we called them his familiar spirits. When he woke in the morning he could see them as he lay in bed, and sometimes they would come to his window if he had put out a breakfast for them overnight. But as a rule they took their own breakfast in the fields with the rooks and starlings and peewits, while he was dressing; and when, after his own breakfast, he took his walk up and down the garden path, they were to be seen perched on their gurgoyles, preening their feathers, chatting, and turning their wise old heads round and round in great ease of body and contentment of mind. In the early spring, after a bath in the large flat earthenware pan, which was daily filled for them by the housekeeper, they would turn their attention to a heap of odds and ends laid out for them in a corner of the garden: bits of string, old shoe-laces, shreds of all sorts,—everything that was wanted for nothing else went into the Doctor’s “library,” as the old Scholar called it, in which he and his wife conducted their researches. Nor could our dear old friend always refrain from adding some special treasure to the heap: he is known to have cut off one button after another from his coat, because they had a gleam upon them that he thought would please, and fragments of his old neckties were found in the tower when the long companionship had at last come to an end. It was only after the nesting season that for a time he missed them, when they took their young family out into the world, and introduced them to the society of which we may hope they have since become ornaments; and this absence the old Scholar took in very good part, being confident that he should see them again in August at latest. Besides, at the end of June I myself came home to the village: and though I could not hope to rival them in his esteem or respect, I might make shift to fill the gap till they returned. When I went to see him he would take my hand with all kindness, and invariably point to the vacant church tower. “I am glad to see you, my lad: Dr. and Mrs. Jackson have gone for a few days into the country with the children, but they will be home again long before you leave us.”

It is sad to me even now to think that such an old friendship, which I am sure was felt in equal strength by both men and birds, should ever have come to an end. It had to be, but it gives me pain to tell the story.

The old Vicar fell into a drowsy decay, and the murmur of his sermons was heard no more in the church. A Curate took the work for him, and the old Scholar came and listened as before; but the sweet old memories of a long friendship were not to be found in those discourses, nor the flashes of light from the world’s great poets and thinkers that had been wont to keep him awake and cheer him. And at last the old shepherd died, and slept among the sheep to whose needs he had been ministering so quietly for half a century. The old Scholar, bent and withered, was there to see the last of his friend, and the Doctor and his wife looked sadly down from the tower. They never saw him again outside his own garden.

A new Vicar came, a kindly, shrewd, and active man, whose sense of the right order of things was sadly wounded as he examined the church from end to end in company with his churchwardens. “You have let the fabric fall into ruin, Mr. Harding,” he said, “into ruin: I can’t use a milder word. We must scrape together what we can, and make it fit for divine worship. Let us come up into the tower and see how things are there.”

The crestfallen churchwardens followed him up the well-worn stairs, but were left far behind, and his active youthful figure disappeared in front of them into the darkness. When they found him at last in the ringers’ chamber, he was kicking at a great heap of refuse accumulated on the floor in a corner.

“What on earth is this, Mr. Harding?” asked the Vicar. “Who makes a kitchen-midden of the church tower?”