There is another sound which you hear of summer evenings, often far into the night, and which is nearly akin to that of the nightjar. I heard it only a minute ago in one of the garden hedges as I came across the green. But when the two songs occur together, there is no confusing them. They are both continuous, mechanical sounds, and each is curiously varied in tone, speed, and intensity. But while the nightjar’s music is a rich full tremolo, uttered from some high point, generally the branch of a tree, the grasshopper-warbler sings always close to earth. His note is thinner, shriller, faster. If your fingers were as deft as his slender throat, you could imitate the sound exactly by the rapid chinking together of two threepenny-bits. JULY I IN the spring of the year, July seems as far off as middle-age seems to youth, and almost as undesirable. But when midsummer-day is past and gone, whether in human life or the year’s progress, we look at things with clearer, more widely ranging eyes. The man in his prime strength, the season at the summit of its beauty—these are fairer things than the childhood and the springtime that have gone to make them. For the greater must be all the greater and more wonderful, because it contains the wondrous less. Here is the first day of July come, and ever since sunrise I have been straying about the field-paths and lanes, wending home, indeed, only when the fierce noontide heat and a ravening hunger combined to drive me thither. There was this fierce, tropic quality in the sunlight from the very first. Though the gilt arrow on the church dial pointed barely to four o’clock, the level sunbeams struck hot and bright on the face; and the dew in the grass by the laneside was shrinking visibly with every moment. In an hour the last water-bell was gone from the shadiest nook in the wood. Only the teasels could defy the thirsty sun, and these kept their water-traps over-brimming, as if fed from a magic source, far into the heat of the day.