One of the prettiest spots by the water was that very one where the spotted bird was accustomed to come, and I often went there at noon and sat for an hour on the grassy bank in the shade of the drumming-tree. The river was but thirty to forty feet wide at that spot, with masses of water forget-me-not growing on the opposite bank, clearly reflected {13} in the sherry-coloured sunlit current below. The trees were mostly oaks, in the young vivid green of early June foliage. And one day when the sky, seen through that fresh foliage, was without a stain of vapour in its pure azure, when the wood was full of clear sunlight--so clear that silken spider webs, thirty or forty feet high in the oaks, were visible as shining red and blue and purple lines--the bird, after drumming high above my head, flew to an oak tree just before me, and clinging vertically to the bark on the high part of the trunk, remained there motionless for some time. His statuesque attitude, as he sat with his head thrown well back, the light glinting on his hard polished feathers, black and white and crimson, the setting in which he appeared of greenest translucent leaves and hoary bark and open sunlit space, all together made him seem not only our handsomest woodpecker, but our most beautiful bird. I had seen him at his best, and sitting there motionless amid the wind-fluttered leaves, he was like a bird-figure carved from some beautiful vari-coloured stone. The most interesting events in animal life observed at this spot relate to the cuckoo in the spring of 1900. Some time before this Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace said, in the course of a talk we had, that he very much wanted me to find out exactly what happened in a nest in which a young cuckoo was hatched. It was, I replied, an old, old story--what could I see, supposing I was lucky enough to find a nest where I {14} could observe it properly, more than Jenner, Hancock, Mrs. Hugh Blackburn, and perhaps other writers, had told us? Yes, it was an old story, he said, and he wanted it told again by someone else. People had lately been discrediting Jenner's account, and as to the other chief authority I had named, one writer, a Dr. Creighton, had said, "As for artists like Mrs. Blackburn, they can draw what they please--all out of their own brains: we can't trust them, or such as them." Sober-minded naturalists had come to regard the habit and abnormal strength attributed to the newly-hatched cuckoo as "not proven" or quite incredible; thus Seebohm had said, "One feels inclined to class these narratives with the equally well-authenticated stories of ghosts and other apparitions which abound."