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Updated: June 5, 2025
The yellow-hammer poising and darting along the hedge, the sparrow twittering round the rick, the cock picking and crowing, were all intent on life, proclaiming that they were alive and busy. Something vivid, alert, impassioned was going forward everywhere, something being effected, something uttered and yet the cause how utterly hidden from me and from every living thing!
"If only everybody in England could move as I am moving now," he thought. "If only I could be granted the power to show a few people, so that they could show others, and those others show all the world. How confidently that yellow-hammer repeats his song! How well he knows that his song is right! How little he envies the linnet and how little the linnet envies him!
I have known a black-fishing expedition stopped because a "yellow yite," or yellow-hammer, hovered round the gang when they were setting out. Still more ominous was the "peat" when it appeared with one or three companions. An old rhyme about this bird runs "One is joy, two is grief, three's a bridal, four is death."
She began to walk down the lane. 'I thought you were going to run, cried Hubert. She looked back, and her silver laugh made chorus with the joyous refrain of a yellow-hammer, piping behind the hedge. Till the turn of the road she continued walking, then Hubert had a glimpse of white folds waving in the act of flight, and she was beyond his vision.
A few days before the new year opened I saw a yellow-hammer attacking, in a very ingenious manner, a straw that hung pendent, the ear downwards, from the post of a windy gateway. She fluttered up from the ground, clung to the ear, and outspread her wings, keeping them rigid.
Every fellow was yelling at the top of his voice, "Yaller-hammer, Alabama, flicker, flicker, flicker, yaller-hammer, Alabama, flicker, flicker, flicker." I felt sorry for the yellow-hammer Alabamians, they looked so hacked, and answered back never a word. When they had passed, two pieces of artillery passed us.
It is a very small bird, and has a long, facile, slender tail. Its song is a lisping, chattering, incoherent warble, now faintly reminding one of the goldfinch, now of a miniature catbird, then of a tiny yellow-hammer, having much variety, but no unity and little cadence.
In fact he was as bad as George Fox, who after taking off his shoes to curse the bloody city of Lichfield should only have put them on again to walk away from it. The grey road was by now beginning to climb the foothills of the Cotswolds; a yellow-hammer, keeping always a few paces ahead, twittered from quickset boughs nine encouraging notes that drowned the echoes of ancient controversies.
Lord J. Related! a strange mistake, Wheeler. Talb. Overshot yourself, Wheeler; overshot yourself, by all that's awkward. And yet, till now, I always took you for "a dead-shot at a yellow-hammer."* *Young noblemen at Oxford wear yellow tufts at the tops of their caps. Hence their flatterers are said to be dead-shots at yellow-hammers. Wheel. Bursal, a word with you. Talb.
"When I was here first," says the brother, "the thrushes were still singing. They are off duty by now, the very last of them." He stops listening. "That's a yellow-hammer. And that's a linnet. You can't tell one from the other." "I know. I'm shockingly ignorant.... What, dear? What is it you want?"
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