There is not in this song the faintest trace of plaintiveness, and of that heart-touching quality of tenderness which gives so great a charm to some of the warblers. It is pre-eminently cheerful; a song of summer and love and happiness of so contagious a spirit that to listen to it critically, as one would listen to the polished phrases of the nightingale, would be impossible. The throstle is a very persistent singer: in spring and summer his loud carols may be heard from a tree-top at four o’clock or half-past three in the morning; throughout the day he sings at intervals, and again, more continuously, in the evening, when he keeps up an intermittent flow of melody until dark. His evening music always seems his best, but the effect is probably due to the comparative silence and the witching aspect of nature at that hour, when the sky is still luminous, and the earth beneath the dusky green foliage lies in deepest shadow. So far only the music of the throstle has been considered; but in the case of this bird the music is nearly everything. When we think of the throstle, we have the small sober-coloured figure that skulks in the evergreens, and its life-habits, less in our minds than the overmastering musical sounds with which he fills the green places of the earth from early spring until the great silence of July and August falls on nature. The song-thrush is a common species in suitable localities throughout the British Islands, being rarest in the north of Scotland. He is found in this country all the year round, but it was discovered many years ago, by Professor Newton, that a very limited number of birds remain to winter with us. Probably they migrate by night, as the fieldfare and redwing are known to do, and, being much less gregarious than those birds, come and go without exciting attention. The fact remains that, where they are abundant in summer, a time comes in autumn when they mysteriously vanish. One or two individuals may remain where twenty or thirty existed previously; and if they only shifted their quarters, as the missel-thrushes do in some parts of the country, they would be found in considerable numbers during the winter in some districts. But the disappearance is general. I am inclined to think that this thrush migration is not so general as Professor Newton believes, and that the birds that leave our shores are mainly those that breed in the northern parts of the country. During the exceptionally severe winter of 1894–5 the thrushes that remained with us suffered more than most species, and in the following spring I found that the song-thrush had become rare throughout the southern half of England. FIG. 19.--THROSTLE’S NEST.