From morning until evening all around and about the cottage, and out of doors whithersoever I bent my steps, from the masses of deep green foliage, sounded the perpetual airy prattle of these delightful birds. One had the idea that the concealed vocalists were continually meeting each other at little social gatherings, where they exchanged pretty loving greetings, and indulged in a leafy gossip, interspersed with occasional fragments of music, vocal and instrumental; now a long trill--a trilling, a tinkling, a sweeping of one minute finger-tip over metal strings as fine as gossamer threads--describe it how you will, you cannot describe it; then the long, low, inflected scream, like a lark's throat-note drawn out and inflected; little chirps and chirruping exclamations and remarks, and a soft warbled note three or four or more times repeated, and sometimes, the singer fluttering up out of the foliage and hovering in the air, displaying his green and yellow plumage while emitting these lovely notes; and again the trill, trill answering trill in different keys; and again the music scream, as if some unsubstantial being, fairy or woodnymph had screamed somewhere in her green hiding-place. In London one frequently hears, especially in the spring, half-a-dozen sparrows just met together in a garden tree, or among the ivy or creeper on a wall, burst out suddenly into a confused rapturous chorus of chirruping sounds, mingled with others of a finer quality, liquid and ringing. At such times one is vexed to think that there are writers on birds who invariably speak of the sparrow as a tuneless creature, a harsh chirper, and nothing more. It strikes one that such writers either wilfully abuse or are ignorant of the right meaning of words, so wild and glad in character are these concerts of town sparrows, and so refreshing to the tired and noise-vexed brain! But now when I listened to the greenfinches in the village elms and hedgerows, if by chance a few sparrows burst out in loud gratulatory notes, the sounds they emitted appeared coarse, and I wished the chirrupers away. But with the true and brilliant songsters it seemed to me that the rippling greenfinch music was always in harmony, forming as it were a kind of airy, subdued accompaniment to their loud and ringing tones. I had had my nightingale days, my cuckoo and blackbird and tree-pipit days, with others too numerous to mention, and now I was having my greenfinch days; and these were the last.