I shall not soon forget how my ears were beset that bright May morning, two days after my arrival at Glasgow, when I walked from Ayr to Alloway, a course of three miles in one of the most charming and fertile rural districts in Scotland. It was as warm as mid-June, and the country had the most leafy and luxuriant June aspect. Above a broad stretch of undulating meadow-land on my right the larks were in full song. These I knew; these I welcomed. What a sound up there, as if the sunshine were vocal! A little farther along, in a clover field, I heard my first corn-crake. "Crex, crex, crex," came the harsh note out of the grass, like the rasping sound of some large insect, and I knew the bird at once. But when I came to a beautiful grove or wood, jealously guarded by a wall twelve feet high (some fine house concealed back there, I saw by the entrance), what a throng of strange songs and calls beset my ears! The concert was at its height. The wood fairly rang and reverberated with bird-voices. How loud, how vivacious, almost clamorous, they sounded to me! I paused in delightful bewilderment. Two or three species of birds, as I afterwards found, were probably making all the music I heard, and of these, one species was contributing at least two thirds of it. At Alloway I tarried nearly a week, putting up at a neat little inn "Where Doon rins, wimplin', clear," and I was not long in analyzing this spirited bird-choir, and tracing each note home to its proper source. It was, indeed, a burst of song, as the Duke of Argyll had said, but the principal singer his grace does not mention. Indeed, nothing I had read, or could find in the few popular treatises on British ornithology I carried about with me, had given me any inkling of which was the most abundant and vociferous English song-bird, any more than what I had read or heard had given me any idea of which was the most striking and conspicuous wild flower, or which the most universal weed. Now the most abundant song-bird in Britain is the chaffinch, the most conspicuous wild flower (at least in those parts of the country I saw) is the foxglove, and the most ubiquitous weed is the nettle. Throughout the month of May, and probably during all the spring months, the chaffinch makes two thirds of the music that ordinarily greets the ear as one walks or drives about the country. In both England and Scotland, in my walks up to the time of my departure, the last of July, I seemed to see three chaffinches to one of any other species of bird. It is a permanent resident in this island, and in winter appears in immense flocks. The male is the prettiest of British song-birds, with its soft blue-gray back, barred wings, and pink breast and sides. The Scotch call it shilfa. At Alloway there was a shilfa for every tree, and its hurried and incessant notes met and intersected each other from all directions every moment of the day, like wavelets on a summer pool. So many birds, and each one so persistent and