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How quiet she was night, with her mystery, bereft of moon, in whose darkness seemed to vibrate still the song of the cuckoos that had been calling so all day! And whisperings of leaves communed with Felix.
We can't all have cuckoos any more than we can all have lobretias. I must come again in August, when one of the pioneers may have struggled here. Of course in Hampshire " "CUCK-OO," said somebody from the apple tree. "There!" cried Miss Middleton. "That's much better," I said. "Now make it come from the laburnum, Lieutenant." "I'm not doing it, really!" she said. "At least only the first time."
The food habits of cuckoos render them very desirable, since they eat hairy caterpillars, particularly tent-caterpillars, for which they seem to have an especial fondness, fall web-worms and locusts, besides other injurious insects, but they are accused of bad habits in relation to other birds, and can therefore hardly be classed among the wholly useful birds.
Suddenly in the distance, she heard a well-known sound, "Cuckoo, cuckoo." "Can that be the cuckoo?" she said to herself; and in a moment she felt sure that it must be. For, for some reason that I do not know enough about the habits of real "flesh and blood" cuckoos to explain, that bird was not known in the neighbourhood where Griselda's aunts lived.
"Are cuckoos' eggs small, uncle?" I said. "Very, my boy, for so large a bird. I have seen them very little larger than the wagtail's with which they were placed. Then as to their crying `cuckoo' when summer draws near. I have heard their notes, and they live in a land of eternal summer. But go on emptying the case."
"Master, the young man went from you to Sevenbergen." Ghysbrecht groaned. "To the house of Peter the Magician." "Look into your own heart and write!" said Herr Cant; and earth's cuckoos echoed the cry. Look into the Rhine where it is deepest, and the Thames where it is thickest, and paint the bottom.
Whilst on the subject of Cuckoos I may mention, for the information of such of my Guernsey readers who are not ornithologists, and therefore not well acquainted with the fact, the peculiar state of plumage in which the female Cuckoo occasionally returns northward in her second summer; I mean the dull reddish plumage barred with brown, extremely like that of the female Kestrel: in this plumage she occasionally returns in her second year and breeds; but when this is changed for the more general plumage I am unable to state for certain, but probably after the second autumnal moult.
"I wish we could find and shoot dozens of them, but I don't long for the task of skinning them; they are so delicate and likely to tear." "Like all the birds related to the cuckoos," said my uncle; "but we were very successful over this. By the way, Pete is getting very handy in that way.
And in a minute she added, softwise, "Ay, were that all!" "Ah," said Mary, "but I'll take the next one that asks me, if it's only to save myself the taunts at home! You thought you were winning to a soft nest, children, where there were nought but larks and thrushes and maybe nightingales, and we're all cuckoos.
Cuckoos shouted in the wind-riven larches, green beyond imagining, at the back of the chapel. A blackbird meditated aloud in high rhapsody, very leisured, but very tireless, on matters deeper than the Coppice Pool far below, deep as the mystery of the chipped, freckled eggs in his nest in the thorn.
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