After thinking it over, I fancy that for all-round serviceability you cannot do better than the blackbird. He starts singing in January, as a rule, and keeps at it till August, always a beautiful song, but not always the same song. It is a clear-blue message of hope, as it rings out on a cold winter’s day. As the spring progresses, it becomes a cascade that overflows with bubbling sound and ends with a challenge: “Let any blackbird dare to say he can sing that cadenza as brilliantly as I can, and I’ll know the reason why!” Later on, when the nestlings keep up a constant demand for “more,” he only manages to get in an occasional stanza; and that, I am inclined to think, is when he has a difference of opinion with another of his kind; though sometimes he sings a rippling, pulsating song to the setting sun. But best of all I love him when the summer has run well on into July. He is getting tired then; two families—possibly with four in the nest at a time—are something of a handful to cater for. He has become draggled and weary in appearance. His yellow-ringed eyes do not seem as sparkling as they were. But he still tries to do his best, and towards sundown you may hear him singing; one of those in my garden seems to have a preference for an underbough on a tall pine, where he stands almost hidden from sight, and whistles gently and softly—though not to me personally, as the robin does; apparently he is talking to himself. Gone is the buoyancy of his early spring song; gone the self-assertiveness, the boastfulness and dominating clamour of his early married life. Now, his song is much subdued, gentler, and strangely suggestive of a quiet, almost saddened reminiscence. Is it that his family have failed to come up to his expectations? Is his song tinged with regret for the lost happiness of those first glad days of spring? Or is it the reflection of the tranquillity that comes to those who bravely shouldered life’s responsibility when the time came for leaving behind the things of youth? Who knows what that subdued but exquisite little song means, as it falls, like a rain of soft, gentle sounds from the branches above? I cannot tell, but it stirs something strangely responsive in my own heart; I sense far-back things that I cannot take hold of, or put into tangible shape, and for the moment I feel mysteriously akin to the unseen singer in the blue-green depths of the old and rugged pine. VII Only Small Talk I SEEM to have wandered a long way from Eileen, but it was really she who brought the birds to my mind.