So, again, in the ferocious old European fighting-days, warriors were perpetually singing--not love songs, for these were delegated to professionals and mercenaries, but war-chaunts. Heroes of the Berserker and hardy Norseman type got up and sang whenever they were excited, as naturally as blackbirds do, but their singing must have been much more like the lion's than the bird's. Savage races at the present day, whenever they are unamiably inclined, fall to "singing" war-songs, which they improvise, music and words alike; and to our ears their compositions are hideous. So, no doubt, the blackbird would think the lion's, and the lion think the blackbird's. Birds and beasts, no doubt, differ as much in ear as they do in voice. But reverse their sizes, and see the result. The emu bellows and booms; there are mice that "sing" quite prettily. If the lion were the size of a blackbird, he would, perhaps, as Bottom said, "roar you as gently as any sucking-dove: roar you as 'twere any nightingale." "_Swallows obeying the South Summer's call._" KEATS. Voice alone does not make a bird a favourite, or what could we say for the swallow, that has so slight a song, and yet, excepting the robin, is "privileged above the rest Of all the birds as man's familiar guest." In the old days Rome loved the swallows as the spirits of dead children revisiting their homes, and Rhodes welcomed the bird's return with public song and canticles of thanks. And long before Rome and Rhodes, men said that it was the swallow that brought Noah back the leaf; and the swallow, when Adam and Eve were separated after the Flood, brought our first parents together again, by telling Adam in Serendib that Eve was on the Red Sea coast. In later days it is a sacred bird in all four quarters of Europe: "the bird of consolation" in the North; "bird of the happy beak" in the South; "the bird of the hearth" in the West; and "the bird of God" in the East. Apart from all this, "the clime-changing swallow," slipt from the secret hand of Providence, that comes all the way from Southern Africa to hunt our May-flies, is one of the oracles of Nature and the joyous evangelist of happy Summer.