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 Grunen
Mit Halmen umhullt,"

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 whic