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I tell you what, brother, frequently as I have sat under a hedge in spring or summer time, and heard the cuckoo, I have thought that we chals and cuckoos are alike in many respects, but especially in character. Everybody speaks ill of us both, and everybody is glad to see both of us again. "'Yes, Jasper, but there is some difference between men and cuckoos; men have souls, Jasper!
On a beautiful evening in June, when the land was sweet with roses, and the cuckoos called insistently to one another from copse and wood, Owen Rose brought his wife home, for the second time, to Greenriver. They had spent the intervening weeks in Italy; and to the end of her life Toni would look upon those glorious Italian days as her true honeymoon.
What scrambling, what shouting, what glee from Lizzy! twenty cuckoos might have sung unheard whilst she was pulling her own flowers, and stealing mine, and laughing, screaming, and talking through all.
As Raffles looked at me, I looked at Crawshay, anticipating trouble; and trouble brewed in his blank, fierce face, in the glitter of his startled eyes, in the sudden closing of his fists. "And what's to become o' me?" he cried out with an oath. "You wait here." "No, you don't," he roared, and at a bound had his back to the door. "You don't get round me like that, you cuckoos!"
Occasionally, however, this southern migration during the winter seems to be doubted, as a clerical friend of mine once told me that a brother clergyman, a well educated and even a learned man, told him, when talking about Cuckoos and what became of them in winter, that "it was a mistake to suppose they migrated, but that they all turned into Sparrow-hawks in the winter."
The characters are surrounded by Nature, with which they are in constant communion. The mango and other trees, creepers, lotuses, and pale-red trumpet-flowers, gazelles, flamingoes, bright-hued parrots, and Indian cuckoos, in the midst of which they move, are often addressed by them and form an essential part of their lives. Hence the influence of Nature on the minds of lovers is much dwelt on.
With respect to the means by which this strange and odious instinct was acquired, if it were of great importance for the young cuckoo, as is probably the case, to receive as much food as possible soon after birth, I can see no special difficulty in its having gradually acquired, during successive generations, the blind desire, the strength, and structure necessary for the work of ejection; for those cuckoos which had such habits and structure best developed would be the most securely reared.
Swainson has well remarked, that with the exception of the Molothrus pecoris, to which must be added the M. niger, the cuckoos are the only birds which can be called truly parasitical; namely, such as "fasten themselves, as it were, on another living animal, whose animal heat brings their young into life, whose food they live upon, and whose death would cause theirs during the period of infancy."
Beautiful grass-green doves, little crimson and black flower-peckers, large black cuckoos, metallic king-crows, golden orioles, and the fine jungle-cocks the origin of all our domestic breeds of poultry were among the birds that chiefly attracted my attention during our stay at Labuan Tring. The most characteristic feature of the jungle was its thorniness.
The only Cuckoos' eggs I saw were a few in the Museum, and in one or two other small collections: all these were very much the same, and what appears to me the usual type of Cuckoo's egg, a dull greyish ground much spotted with brown, and a few small black marks much like many eggs of the Tree or Meadow Pipit.
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