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"Methinks, young cousin, that in such scenes, those silly rhymes taught us in our childhood of the green woods and the summer cuckoos, of bold Robin and Maid Marian, ring back in our ears. Alas that this fair land should be so often dyed in the blood of her own children! Here, how the thought shrinks from broils and war, civil war, war between brother and brother, son and father!
Accidents began to happen, the first one when one of the "old family cuckoos," as the rolling machines were disdainfully called, showed a sudden burst of old-time speed and left the ground in an alarming manner.
It is this that has cost him so dear with the critics, and the superior people, 'empty wearisome cuckoos, and doleful monotonous owls, innumerable jays also and twittering sparrows of the housetops. He compares his own ideas to his handwriting, irregular and sprawling; his nature to Corinthian brass, made up of an infinite variety of ingredients, and his head to a tavern which might have been full of lords drinking Burgundy, but has been invaded by low punch-drinkers whom the landlord cannot expel.
Every bird for miles around was singing: blackbirds sounded like England, wood-pigeons cooed, cuckoos insisted, and among them all, strange and Indian, a hoopoe called. The sun climbed up behind the saint-house and solitary palm; the olives began to cast shadows; the grass was silver with dew. We breakfasted soon after six, our table out on the green lawn. Such air and scents of moist earth!
If I have called in the cuckoo to illustrate the ordinary man's ignorance, it is not because I can speak with authority on that bird. It is simply because, passing the spring in a parish that seemed to have been invaded by all the cuckoos of Africa, I realised how exceedingly little I, or anybody else I met, knew about them. But your and my ignorance is not confined to cuckoos.
The midges bit him, the dancing gnats tried to fly into his mouth, and all the spring around him seemed to grow more lovely and alive; the songs of the cuckoos and the blackbirds, the laughter of the yaflies, the level-slanting sunlight, the apple blossom which had crowned her head!
Just as the countryfolk regard the wryneck as leader of the wandering cuckoos, and the short-eared owl as forerunner of the woodcocks, so the ancients held that the landrail performed the same service of pioneer to the quail on its long journeys over land and sea.
Then, sitting on the grey and lichen-covered rail under the cover of a hawthorn, I saw sometimes two and sometimes three cuckoos following each other courting, now round the copse, now by the hedge or the brook, and presently along the rails where they constantly perched. Occasionally one would alight on the sward among the purple flowers of the meadow orchis.
"What can it matter to him whether Louis the Eighteenth's bugs or Napoleon's cuckoos are on the flag, if it is the flag of his country? France is France! For my part, I'd paint for the devil. A soldier ought to fight, if he is a soldier, for the love of his art. If he had stayed quietly in the army, he would have been a general by this time."
I immediately took this as a text addressed to the pupils, and the principal was surprised to learn that these birds were so valuable. In the Park the sparrow hawks nest in a hollow tree, as do the screech owls. Other most valuable birds which nest in the Park are the black-billed and yellow-billed cuckoos, whose depredations among the hairy and spiny caterpillars should arouse our gratitude.
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