chaffinch is not an interesting person, and he is so numerous that one soon becomes weary of him and his song.  Let us hope that he expresses his real nature in the building of his pretty nest rather than in song.  This must, I think, often happen, and to take an example from human builders, it is not inconceivable that the architect of St. John’s College Chapel, Cambridge, may have sung delightfully.  But there are limits to one’s faith, and personally I cannot imagine the desecrator of Pembroke College in the same injured town of Cambridge practising any art in a way that would please me.

To return to birds—the greenfinch is a pleasant singer, or perhaps a conversationalist.  I am never tired of hearing him repeat the word “Squeese” as

he sits hidden in the heavy shade of the summer elms.  His twinkling bell-note with its contented simplicity is also attractive.  His cousin, the bunting, makes remarks not unlike those of the greenfinch; and he appears to address them by preference to the travellers on dusty high roads, where he passes much of his time sitting on telegraph wires.  The anchorite yellow-hammer persistently declining cheese with his bread is always pleasant.  Professor Newton used to say that the spring begins with the yellow-hammer’s song.  According to Blomefield’s Calendar [8] the average date in Cambridgeshire is February 16, but he has been known to sing on January 30—rather a wintry beginning for spring.  I have never made up my mind as to what the kitty-wren says or sings.  He is always in a desperate hurry to get through his piece, as if he were afraid of lagging behind the beat of some invisible conductor.  In consequence of this there is a want of restraint, and a style that suggests a shy child gabbling a show bit of poetry.  But I repent these words for I love the kitty-wren.

There are a multitude of other bird-sounds which are pleasant to hear as their turn comes round, for instance, the complaint of the wryneck, the “cuckoo’s mate,” who seems to me to be querulously expressing his dislike to my garden, which he tries year after year and deserts after a day or two.

I have never heard that contented bird the

quail, who should be a wholesome lesson to all wrynecks.  I should like to hear him as Schubert has him:

“Sitzend im Grünen
Mit Halmen umhüllt,”

and singing “Lobe Gott” all day in the rhythm with which the oboe praises God in the Pastoral Symphony.

Another bird, whom I take for a contented fellow, is the green woodpecker, for he goes through life laughing, but I am not quite sure that I should like his taste in jokes.  He is always associated in my mind with a passage in a letter of my father’s: “At last I fell fast asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me; and squirrels running up the trees, and some woodpeckers laughing, and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed.” [9]

There are many noises rather than notes which are most pleasant to hear.  The invisible industrious corncrake, whose persistent cry comes from nowhere and everywhere at once.  The harsh warning of the jay who seems to say “Man! man!” as he skulks off when his wood is invaded.  The rough noise of the ox-eye sharpening his little saw, and many others.

Then I must not forget the noise of birds in flocks, ranging from the familiar wrangle of sparrows noisily going to roost, to the mysterious sound of

great flights of birds migrating at night, one of the most romantic of sounds, but to me untranslatable, since I do not know the language of these wanderers.

I come now to human sounds.  It was exciting to wake at 5 o’clock some morning in June, and to learn by the sound of scythes being whetted that the mowers had arrived, and that the hay harvest had actually begun.  The field had been a great sea of tall grasses, pink with sorrel and white with dog-daisies, a sacred sea into which we might not enter.  But now we could at least follow the mowers, and watch the growth of the tracks made by their shifting feet, and listen to the swish of the scythes as the swathes of fallen grass and flowers also grew in length.  There was something military in their rhythm, and something relentless and machine-like in their persistence.  But our admiration was mixed with pity from the time that one of them told us that after the first day’s mowing he was too tired to sleep.  In later years another sound was associated with haymaking, when in an Alpine meadow the group of resting peasants were heard hammering the blades of their little pre-Raphaelite scythes to flatten the dents made by stones hidden among the grass.

A well-remembered sound that came near the end of the harvest was the cry of “Stand fast!” which was heard at intervals warning the man in the cart, whose duty it was to arrange the pitched-up hay, that a move was to be made.  Why it was necessary to shout the warning so that it could be heard a quarter of a mile away I cannot say.  But its impressive effect depended

on its loud chant-like tone.  This sound is connected with recollections of riding in the empty hay-cart, from the sea-green stack mysteriously growing in the corner of the field back to where hay waited to be carted.  The inside of the hay-cart was enchantingly polished, and also full of hay-seed, which had a charm for me.  The hay-making at Down was a leisurely affair, with many women gossiping as they gently turned the hay.  There was, however, one man of whom we children were much afraid, a fierce red-eyed old labourer who acted as foreman, and did not hesitate to show that he thought us out of place in a hay-field.

One sound there was peculiar to Down,—I mean the sound of drawing water.  In that dry chalky country we depended for drinking-water on a deep well from which it came up cold and pure in buckets.  These were raised by a wire rope wound on a spindle turned by a heavy fly-wheel, and it was the monotonous song of the turning wheel that became so familiar to us.  The well-house, gloomily placed among laurel bushes, had a sort of terrifying attraction for us, and I remember dropping pebbles and waiting—it seemed ages—for them to fall into the water below.  We believed the well to be 365 feet deep, also that this was the height of the dome of St. Paul’s—I have never tested the truth of either statement.  The opening was roofed in by a pair of hinged flaps, or doors, and I especially liked the moment when the rising bucket crashed into the doors from below, throwing them open with a brutal and roystering air, which one forgave it as having made a long and dangerous journey

up from the distant water.  But the best was when the empty bucket went down, and the fly-wheel spun round till its spokes were invisible.  Then was the time to remember the death of a dog (called Dick) who was killed by jumping through the flying wheel.  I envied my elder brothers who could actually remember Dick: to me he was only a tragic myth.  I imagine that in hot dry weather more water was drawn, or else that being more constantly out of doors we