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ceived opinion that the noise is caused by the vibration of the wings while the bird is in motion through the air, cannot be entertained. The fact that it occurs only during the season of song, for it is never heard in winter, seems to favour the idea that it is a plain song of the bird, not more singular, after all, than the whirr of the Night-Jar or Grasshopper Warbler."

It is worth while extracting the following, to mark the precise time kept by the nightingale :

"I have been scribbling on till it is not far from midnight, but I cannot put down my pen without making yet one more note. Yesterday, April 16th, is the day in which the Nightingale is generally heard for the first time in this part of Herts. I recollected just now that I had omitted to listen for it, so, to remedy my error as far as possible, I laid down my pen, and softly unbarred the front-door, for all the household but myself were asleep. A charming calm night, a bright moon, clear starlight, no sound but the distant rumbling of a railway train it dies away; out of its ruins rises a faint shrill piping, indicating pain rather than rejoicing; and before that is well ended, out bursts the liquid gurgling note that no instrument but the throat of the Nightingale can produce. The Nightingale is arrived, and, happy augury, I have heard his song before that of the Cuckoo !"

Mr. Johns is worthy to dwell in a cherry country. He speaks with disgust of the cherries usually found in the city market:

"No one of the common fruits is so rarely eaten in perfection as cherries. Strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, and currants, are perishable enough, and, the first two especially, ought to be gathered and eaten at once-and so they often are, for they grow in most gardens; but cherries are less frequent, and are grown, mostly to a limited extent, on trees trained against a wall in the gardens of the wealthy. Those which are sold in the market have been packed and shaken and unpacked, and tumbled from basket to basket, and handled so many times that they have lost the charm of freshness and almost their distinctive character. They are little better than clammy shrivelled skins, containing a mawkish sweet pulp and a large stone. But to plant a ladder against a tree as big as an oak, to mount ten or a dozen rounds, to turn round and lean against the bars, to pull towards you a branch thickly hung with dangling balls black as jet, smooth as glass, filled with juice, liquid, gushing, luscious, and to feel assured that however many you may eat, you have no worse effects to dread than the spoiling of your appetite for the next meal-this is an enjoyment which it would be unfair to call sensual. It ranks with nutting, bilberry-gathering, shrimping, angling, and other amusements which are pursued, not for the sake of indulging the appetite, but as fascinating pastimes."

Oh! to be again a little boy, and go fishing and birds'-nesting with the Rev. E. A. Johns, and to stand upon that twelfth

Pleasures of the Country Parsonage.

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round of the ladder and pull the "black-hearts" in handfuls into the mouth, till hands and lips were as purple as Bacchus !

The "Country Parson," whose "Recreations" stand next on the prefixed list, is not a sportsman-his cloth prohibits that, in Scotland-nor is he much of a naturalist, but he has a genuine love of the country, which entitles him to a place in our gallery; and some of his philosophy is to our present purpose, and we will use it. He has discovered that dwellers in town enjoy the country more than those who live there. He teaches what Shakspere told us before, that

"If all the year were playing holidays,

To sport would be as tedious as to work;"

-that play is valued most by the hard-working man. The propositions are not new, but the author illustrates them happily. "The end of work," says he, "is to enjoy leisure; but to enjoy leisure, you must have gone through work. There is no such thing as play, except to the worker. . . . It is one thing for a dawdling idler to set off to the Continent or to the Highlands, just because he is sick of everything around him, and quite another thing when a hard-wrought man, who is of some use in life, sets off, as gay as a lark, with the pleasant feeling that he has brought some worthy work to an end." In like manner, and with perfect analogy, the town man relishes rural scenes most keenly. The "Country Parson" had once lived in Threadneedle Street, and of course thought green fields and trees made Paradise; but found it not so.

"I live in the country now, and have done so for several years. It is a beautiful district of country too, and amid a quiet and simple population; yet I must confess that my youthful notion of rural bliss is a good deal abated. Use lessens marvel,' it is said; one cannot be always in raptures about what one sees every hour of every day. It is the man in populous cities pent, who knows the value of green fields. It is your Cockney (I mean your educated Londoner) who reads Bracebridge Hall with the keenest delight, and luxuriates in the thought of country scenes, country houses, country life. He has not come close enough to discern the flaws and blemishes of the picture; and he has not learned by experience that in whatever scenes led, human life is always much the same thing. I have long since found that the country, in this nineteenth century, is by no means a scene of Arcadian innocence; that its apparent simplicity is sometimes dogged stupidity; that men lie and cheat in the country just as much as in the town, and that the country has even more of mischievous tittle-tattle; that sorrow and care and anxiety may quite well live in Elizabethan cottages grown over with honeysuckle and jasmine, and that very sad eyes may look forth from the windows round which roses twine."

"Yet, though in a gloomy mood, one can easily make out a long catalogue of country evils,-evils which I know cannot be escaped in a fallen world, and among a sinful race,—still I thank God that my lot is cast in the country. . . . I like the audible stillness in which one lives on autumn days; the murmur of the wind through trees even when leafless, and the brawl of the rivulet even when swollen and brown. There is a constant source of innocent pleasure and interest in little country cares, in planting and tending trees and flowers, in sympathizing with one's horses and dogs, even with pigs and poultry. And although one may have lived beyond middle age without the least idea that he had any taste for such matters, it is amazing how soon he will find, when he comes to call a country home his own, that the taste has only been latent, kept down by circumstances, and ready to spring into vigorous existence whenever the repressing circumstances are removed. Men in whom this is not so, are the exception to the universal rule. Take the Senior Wrangler from his college, and put him down in a pretty country parsonage; and in a few weeks he will take kindly to training honeysuckle and climbing-roses, he will find scope for his mathematics in laying out a flower-garden, and he will be all excitement in planning and carrying out an evergreen shrubbery, a primrose bank, a winding walk, a little stream with a tiny waterfall, spanned by a rustic bridge."

"You look with indescribable interest at an acre of ground which is your own. There is something quite remarkable about your own trees. You have a sense of property in the sunset over your own hills. And there is a perpetual pleasure in the sight of a fair landscape, seen from your own door. Do not believe people who say that all scenes soon become indifferent, through being constantly seen. An ugly street may cease to be a vexation, when you get accustomed to it; but a pleasant prospect becomes even more pleasant, when the beauty which arises from your own associations with it is added to that which is properly its own. No doubt you do grow weary of the landscape before your windows, when you are spending a month at some place of temporary sojourn, seaside or inland; but it is quite different with that which surrounds your own home. You do not try that by so exacting a standard. You never think of calling your constant residence dull, though it may be quiet to a degree which would make you think a place insupportably dull, to which you were paying a week's visit."

"I know a man-an exceedingly clever and learned man-who in town is sharp, severe, hasty, a very little bitter, and just a shade illtempered, who on going to the country becomes instantly genial, frank, playful, kind, and jolly: you would not know him for the same man if his face and form changed only half as much as his intellectual and moral nature."

Here is our author's description of his return to his own parsonage, after a little absence

"You see the snug fire: the chamber so precisely arranged, and so fresh-looking you remark it and value it fifty times more amid country

The "Field" Newspaper.

31

fields and trees than you would turning out of the manifest life and civilisation of the city street. You are growing cheerful and thankful now; but before it grows dark, you must look round out of doors and that makes you entirely thankful and cheerful. Surely the place has grown greener and prettier since you saw it last! You walk about the garden and the shrubbery: the gravel is right, the grass is right, the trees are right, the hedges are right, everything is right. You go to the stable-yard: you pat your horse, and pull his ears, and enjoy seeing his snug resting-place for the night. You peep into the cow-house, now growing very dark: you glance into the abode of the pig: the dog has been capering about you all this while. You are not too great a man to take pleasure in these little things. And now when you enter your library again, where your solitary meal is spread, you sit down in the mellow lamplight, and feel quite happy. How different it would have been to have walked out of a street-cab into a town-house, with nothing beyond its walls to think of!"

Such a writer has a healthy, happily constituted mind; and his book may help to make men more rural, happier, and better. And so adieu and all luck to the "Country Parson!" If he is still a country parson, may his lawn and his shrubbery be ever green; may his manse be bright without and within, and his Yule log burn cheerily; may his parish love and value him! But if they have lured him to serve a town cure and to dwell in towered cities and the busy hum of men, may he be as "jolly" as such adverse circumstances will allow !

If a man is to devote his life to sport, there is no country where he can have sport so continuously as in Britain. Horace's usurer, who would give up his Lombard Street and lead an Arcadian life, anticipated some sport among the pleasures of his retirement. In winter, he was to drive the covert for wild boar; but though he beat the wood with many dogs hinc et hine multo cane,-it was only to drive into snares or traps the tusky pig whom our Indian youth sticks with the spear. The Roman wished to net hares, and thrushes, and craneslet us hope the birds were ortolans and woodcocks in spite of "Riddle" -at any rate, they were for the pot-those jucunda præmia. In spring, summer, autumn, poor Alphius looked for no sport. Not so the English sportsman. Witness the columns of the newspaper, whose title we have joined with worthy company at the head of this Article. What country but Britain could furnish subjects or readers for the weekly sheet devoted to rural pleasures! Under its present management, and showing everywhere the genial influence of Mr. Frank Buckland, and occasionally the curious research of Mr. Pinkerton, The Field comes very near to all we desire in a rural paper. It has

shaken off the occasional coarseness that offended us in our old friend Bell's Life, and without altogether renouncing the old manly prize-fight, and the thoroughly English race-course, it finds room, and turns the attention of its readers-town readers as well as rustics to the more elegant and civilizing pursuits of natural history and gardening. To one who, like ourselves, does not habitually receive it, a file of The Field opens up unexpected enjoyment. It is not any of the subjects of sport or exciting amusement--the hunting, racing, coursing, yachting-that strikes us most. It is the wide-spread interest the paper proves in subjects of natural history-in times and habits of animals, from deer to snails--in farming and gardening-in all plants and fruits-in everything rural,-by people of all ranks and in every situation. It seems as if every village, from Cornwall to Caithness, had a naturalist who communicates his local observations, or states his puzzles, either honestly signing his name, or modestly veiling it under initials. In a late number (5th December), we observed notices of dilatory migration of swallows from Littlehampton, Sussex; from Burton-on-Trent; from Rochester; from Weston-super-mare; from Hastings Of uncommon birds, from Camden-town; from Colchester: Of the shrew mouse and frogs, from Marlborough: Of the robin's migration to Malta Of the unconjugal fight of the white-headed eagles who reverse our human customs, for the wife gets in a rage and kills the husband, from Dr. Bree of Colchester: Of blackcap warblers, and golden-crested wrens, and Bohemian waxwings, from Wick,-alas! what did they there in December? These trifling notices open scenes of rural occupation, of intelligent enjoyment free to poor and rich. Were we to make a tour through England-and where will the tourist find so enjoyable a route as that despised one of home-land ?-we should seek out these correspondents of The Field, and place ourselves under their guidance, each in his own parish.

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With the help of The Field, a stranger might form some idea of country life among us. The character of the man who can enjoy the whole cycle of its sports is, we fear, beyond foreign comprehension. We would gladly lay aside our editorial impersonality for a page, to make our readers a little acquainted with a real living sportsman, in company with whom we poor scribbler have sometimes lived.

Our friend-we may call him so, without naming him-is high-born, and not being born to estate or wealth, he is free of the entanglements which beset the great, much more than men of low degree will believe. But our friend's birth and connexions give him the entrée to some of the best sporting quarters in England and Scotland; and his experience and

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