the little assassin who murders their young that they abandon their own nestlings to their fate without, apparently, any compunction, and concentrate their affection and their pride upon the solitary monster that is left, the destroyer of the rest? And even when the thing has grown so big that its open mouth is almost large enough to engulf its foster-parents, they go on feeding it and following it about as if fascinated by the wretch. Those who wish us to find "sermons in stones, and good in everything," must surely hesitate when they come to look for a moral in the joyous life of the "plain-song cuckoo gray." That it eats hairy caterpillars which no other bird dares to swallow for fear of choking, is certainly a point in its favour, and its ever-welcome "spring-delighting" voice is another. But neither its song, "its two old notes," nor its consumption of "woolly bears," gives human reason a sufficient explanation of its unique iniquity, or justifies its gay enjoyment of a life of perpetual summer without any responsibilities. The Psalmist, seeing "the wicked flourish," broke out into bitter song; so might the poor hedge-sparrow and the pipit. With the cuckoo come many birds from abroad, and all of them welcome, for they fill our gardens and woodlands with varied song, and wage unremitting war upon our insect pests. There are not, probably, many people who notice either their coming or their going, for spring and winter are supposed to be sufficient explanation in themselves for the commencement and cessation of song. Even those who have gardens do not always notice the little singing-birds from abroad, for their plumage is very modest in colour, their habits are shy and retiring, and their songs always sung from the cover of some brake of fern or bramble, some sequestered corner where only the vagabond butterfly catches sight of them as it goes flickering to and fro in its quest of flowers. Both garden-warbler and blackcap are more often heard than seen, and their song, by those who have never heard the nightingale, is regularly mistaken for that bird's. Indeed, when two blackcaps are singing against each other, the alternating songs seem continuous, and the strength of the voice and the extreme beauty of their notes arrest the ear at once, while, being so unlike the song of either blackbird or thrush, which are heard as a rule only from tops of trees, the music is at once called the nightingale's. Or how many of us notice the woodlark (a bird that stays with us all the winter through), even though its song is finer than the skylark's? "A woodlark, o'er the kind contending throng Superior heard, ran thro' the sweetest length of song."