!" or "Here we are again!" But in practice it is the one sound in the
whole landscape that never interjects. It is a monument of barren
reiteration.

I wonder why he does it. No doubt he has some end in view. He must get
something out of it--some bodily ease or mental stimulus or spiritual
consolation. But he must surely have been born with a prodigious passion
for monotony. It may surprise you to learn that in the course of the
season he will make that same remark over two million times. I have
worked it out. Two million is a conservative estimate. It only allows
for eight hours' work out of the twenty-four, for a term of six weeks:
so that it is well within the mark.

Our corncrake--I don't know what the usual standard may be--does
ninety-eight to the minute. He is as regular as the ticking of a clock.
You can't hustle him and you can't wear him out. At times when I have
thought he might be getting tired and thirsty I have imagined that he
was slowing down; but he never gets below ninety-six; and in his most
active and feverish moments he very rarely touches the hundred. At short
measured intervals he punctuates the night with his dry delivery,
unhasting yet unresting, his sole idea to get his forty-seven-thousand
up without a break before the morning. He just doesn't know the meaning
of the word emphasis; he has absolutely no sense of rhythm. Once I tried
to believe that he was talking in three-four time, or at least that he
was occasionally accenting a note. But he never does. He gets no louder
or softer, higher or lower, quicker or slower--he just keeps on.

You need not suppose that I have meekly sat down under this thing. This
is his sixth year, and I have been at war with him all the time. But
finally he holds the field, and my only hope now is that his powers may
begin to fail as old age creeps on. Even if he dropped to eighty a
minute it would be an intense relief. But I dare say he means to
bequeath the pitch to a successor at his death--perhaps to a relative.

At first I used to throw things at him out of the bedroom
window--hairbrushes and slippers and books and all sorts of odds and
ends. I had to go round with a basket after breakfast collecting them.
But it was no good; he never dropped a beat. Then I deliberately
devastated the garden, with a view to deprive him of cover. I had all
the bushes taken up and the flowerbeds removed, and I laid down, just
under my bedroom window, a wide expanse of tar-mac