here, or that we leave our hearts at home and the ear counts for little without the heart, I do not know; but it is a melancholy fact that there are many Englishmen in this country on whom the music of its birds appears to be wholly lost. I have been assured by a man who had spent many years in India that the birds here never sang, but only cawed, or shrieked, or jabbered. When I told him that skylarks, scarcely distinguishable from the "embodied joy" of English fields, were singing every morning in the blue sky above the very road by which he went to his work, he scoffed at me. He had never heard a skylark in India. There are of course more birds of song in this country than in England, because there are more birds altogether, and because the sun that cheers them is brighter and the sky that inspires them more blue. As to the quality of their songs, comparisons are odious and unprofitable, because we cannot invest Indian birds with the associations which endear those of England. The voice of the Blackbird, heard in bed in the cold silence of a spring morning, will sink into one's heart in a way which is impossible in this country, where we are not much given to lying in bed of a morning, and where the cawing of crows, the crowing of cocks, the yelping of pariah dogs, and a medley of other unmusical noises come in at the open windows with the first streak of dawn. Nevertheless, if you do chance to be awake while the crows are still asleep, the song of the Magpie Robin is rich and sweet, and wonderfully powerful for so small a bird. It will go on till eight or nine o'clock, but does not sing, like the Nightingale, during the early hours of the night, As the Magpie Robin perches on trees, so
