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I was with Teague the Smith when he discovered it. . . . But he discovered it too late; and, besides, he was a dreamer, and used it only to make crosses and charms and womanish ornaments." "It's no use to us, anyhow," said the practical wren. "So let us give it away. I hate waste." "I doubt," said the titlark, "it will be much profit to him, wonderful though it is."
Then the young birdcatcher returned to the spot, and creeping quietly up to within five or six feet of the nest threw his hat so that it fell over the sitting titlark; but after having thus secured it he refused to give it up.
The following account, written by an eye-witness, bears the stamp of authenticity, and is furthermore re-enforced by a careful and most graphic drawing made on the spot, which I here reproduce, and fully substantiates the previous statement by Dr. Jenner. The scene of the tragedy was the nest of a pipit, or titlark, on the ground beneath a heather-bush.
Few if any flowers come up after the scythe has gone over, except the white clover, which almost alone shows in the aftermath, or, as country people call it, the 'lattermath. Near me a titlark every few minutes rose from the sward, and spreading his wings came down aslant, singing with all his might.
Sir William Jardine, for instance, in an editorial foot-note in one of Gilbert White's pages, remarks: "It is a curious fact, and one, I believe, not hitherto noticed by naturalists, that the cuckoo deposits its egg in the nests of the titlark, robin, and wagtail by means of its foot.
The monotonous and yet pleasing cry of the peewits, the sweet titlark singing overhead, and the cuckoos flying round, filled the place with the magic charm of spring. Coming to these Cuckoo-fields day after day, there was always something to interest me, either in the meadows themselves or on the way thither. The very dust of the road had something to show.
It builds in their cromlechs, and its song remembers them. It is the bird, too, in whose nest the cuckoo lays; so it knows all about losing one's children and being dispossessed. "We will give him a gift," chirruped the wren, "and send him about his business. He is the first man that has the sense to leave us to ours." "But will he? will he?" the titlark piped back ghostlily.
Past the shadowless winter, when it is all shade, and therefore no shadow; onwards to the first coltsfoot and on to the seed-time again; I knew the dates of all of them. I did not want change; I wanted the same flowers to return on the same day, the titlark to rise soaring from the same oak to fetch down love with a song from heaven to his mate on the nest beneath.
The bird was then put under a hat for safety on the smooth turf a few feet away, and the boys proceeded to take off their jackets and roll up their shirt-sleeves, after which they faced one another, and were just about to begin when Caleb, thrusting out his crook, turned the hat over and away flew the titlark.
It proved to be what I had anticipated, namely the American pipit, or titlark, a slender brown bird, about the size of the sparrow, which passes through the States in the fall and spring, to and from its breeding haunts in the far north. They generally appear by twos and threes, or in small loose flocks, searching for food on banks and plowed ground.
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