ers. This again was but brief satisfaction, for the two
halves of the reed soon curled outwards and ceased to speak. In later
life this curling outwards was made use of in my work in the physiology
of plants. I like to remember that my primeval oboe gave me the idea.

The village boys made 'musics' by fixing strips of laurel leaf into a
split stick, and blowing violently into them, which set the leaf
vibrating and made a coarse scream, but this instrument we despised, and
I think rightly, for it had none of the pleasant tone of the whistle, nor
was there any art in the making of it.

A primeval musical instrument called the 'Whit horn' I have seen in the
possession of the late Mr. Taphouse, of Oxford. It is a conical tube of
bark held together with thorns and sounded by means of a rough oboe-reed
made of bark; there were no finger-holes, and is said to have yielded a
harsh shriek on one note. It was, I think, played on May 1st, or else at
Whitsuntide. It is to Mr. Taphouse that I owe my introduction to the
pipe and tabor which form the subject of a paper in this volume. The
pipe is shrill in its upper register, but this is no great fault in an
instrument meant to be played out of doors: the same fault is to be found
with the flageolet, and the penny whistle. But the last named instrument
is reminiscent of a man playing outside a London public-house, and we
know from the story of the perfidious Sergeant in _The Wrong Box_ to what
lengths it may lead us. {5}

The most truly rustic instrument (and here I mean an instrument of polite
life--an orchestral instrument) is undoubtedly the oboe. The bassoon
runs it hard, but has a touch of comedy and a stronger flavour of
necromancy, while the oboe is quite good and simple in nature and is
excessively in earnest; it seems to have in it the ghost of a sunburnt
boy playing to himself under a tree, in a ragged shirt unbuttoned at the
throat, a boy created by Velasquez. To hear an oboe actually played as a
rustic instrument one must go to Brittany, where it accompanies the
national bagpipe or 'biniou.' To a reed-instrument player it was painful
to see the oboist bite a bit off his reed when the tone was not to his
liking!

From this digression, originating in the whistle cut from a
horse-chestnut bough, I return to some less artificial sounds. I must
say a word about the song of birds, but my knowledge of the subject is
but small. The most obvious of spring-time sound