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Updated: May 22, 2025
Three strange birds were eating out of the pot a cuckoo, a corncrake and a swallow. "Come to the fire, gilly," said the old woman when she looked round. "I am not a gilly, but the King of Ireland's Son," said he. "Well, let that be. What do you want of me?" "Are you the Old Woman of Beare?" "I have been called the Old Woman of Beare since your fore-great-grandfather's time."
For a long time I did not come upon a single bird; at last a corncrake flew out of a thick clump of young oak across the wormwood springing up round it. I fired; it turned over in the air and fell. At the sound of the shot, Kassyan quickly covered his eyes with his hand, and he did not stir till I had reloaded the gun and picked up the bird.
The moon peeped up from the drifting cloudlets and frowned, as it seemed, envying their happiness and regretting her tedious and utterly superfluous virginity. The still air was heavy with the fragrance of lilac and wild cherry. Somewhere in the distance beyond the line a corncrake was calling. "How beautiful it is, Sasha, how beautiful!" murmured the young wife. "It all seems like a dream.
A subtle something, the influence of a presence, remained, which mingled strangely with the odours of the clover in the neuk, and the sour night-smell of the byre. Again there was a perfect silence. Without, a corncrake ground monotonously. A rat scurried along the rafter.
Now and then a corncrake is caught in the same way by hand while sitting on her nest on the ground. It is not, however, as easy as it reads.
'Master, master! cried Kassyan suddenly in his musical voice. I raised myself in surprise: up till then he had scarcely replied to my questions, and now he suddenly addressed me of himself. 'What is it? I asked. 'What did you kill the bird for? he began, looking me straight in the face. 'What for? Corncrake is game; one can eat it.
And she was singing to herself in a thin but happy voice that was not unlike an old and throaty corncrake: "The birds are singing....Hark! Come out and play....Life is an endless search....I've just begun...!" They listened for a little while, and then ran headlong up to join her.
We slowed to little more than steerage-way and lay listening. Presently a hand-bellows foghorn jarred like a corncrake, and there rattled out of the mist a big ship literally above us. We could count the rivets in her plates as we scrooped by, and the little drops of dew gathered below them. "Wonder why they're always barks always steel always four-masted an' never less than two thousand tons.
The sound is not musical, for when it is not a continuous scissor-grinding noise, it is like the cry of a corncrake with a weak throat; but what delight there is in it! and how it expresses that joy in the present and recklessness of the morrow, which the fabulist has in vain contrasted with the virtuous industry of the ant in order to point a moral for mankind! vainly, because the cigale's short life in the sunlit trees will ever seem to men a more ideal one than that of the earth-burrowing ant, with its possible longevity, its peevish parsimony, and restless anxiety for the future.
There was perfect stillness in the air wrapped in slumber and darkness. Even the watchman, paid to disturb the stillness of night, was silent; even the corncrake the only wild creature of the feathered tribe that does not shun the proximity of summer visitors was silent. The stillness was broken by Marya Mihalovna herself.
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