In colour, the upper parts of the nightingale are of a rich brown; the tail of a reddish tint; the throat and underparts of the body, greyish-white; the neck and breast, grey; the bill and legs, light brown. Its size is about that of the garden warblers, which it resembles in form—being, in fact, one of that family. Thus, the most admired of all singers—the subject of poets’ songs and eulogies, the bird that people walk far and wide to listen to, of which they talk for weeks before it comes, noting down the day of its arrival as if it were the Queen or the Queen’s son—is yet nothing but a little insignificant brown bird, not to be named with the parrot for plumage, nor with our little goldfinch, who always looks as if he had his Sunday suit on. But this is a good lesson for us. The little brown nightingale, with his little brown wife in the thickety copse, with their simple unpretending nest, not built up aloft on the tree branch, but humbly at the tree’s root, or even on the very ground itself, may teach us that the world’s external show or costliness is not true greatness. The world’s best bird-singer might have been as big as an eagle, attired in colours of blue and scarlet and orange like the grandest macaw. But the great Creator willed that it should not be so—his strength, and his furiousness, and his cruel capacity were sufficient for the eagle, and his shining vestments for the macaw; whilst the bird to which was given the divinest gift of song must be humble and unobtrusive, small of size, with no surpassing beauty of plumage, and loving best to hide itself in the thick seclusion of the copse in which broods the little mother-bird, the very counterpart of himself, upon her olive-coloured eggs. [Sidenote: _The Philomela of Surrey._] Mr. Harrison Weir has given us a sweet little picture of the nightingale at home. Somewhere, not far off, runs the highroad, or it may be a pleasant woodland lane leading from one village to another, and probably known as “Nightingale-lane,” and traversed night after night by rich and poor, learned and unlearned, to listen to the bird. In our own neighbourhood we have a “Nightingale-lane,” with its thickety copses on either hand, its young oaks and Spanish chestnuts shooting upwards, and tangles of wild roses and thick masses of brambles throwing their long sprays over old, mossy, and ivied stumps of trees, cut or blown down in the last generation—little pools and water courses here and there, with their many-coloured mosses and springing rushes—a very paradise for birds. This is in Surrey, and Surrey nightingales, it is said, are the finest that sing. With this comes the saddest part of the story. Bird-catchers follow the nightingale, and, once in his hands, farewell to the pleasant copse with the young oaks and Spanish chestnuts, the wild rose tangles, the little bosky hollow at the old tree root, in one of which the little nest is built and the little wife broods on her eggs!