What a delightful eërie sound it is! Not like a real bird, but like some voice from another world, with its strange power of reiteration, a voice which we cannot do otherwise than listen to; for, as Sir Philip Sidney said, "The cuckoo cometh to you with a tale to hold children from their play, and old men from the chimney corner." From all time men have loved his cry. In the "Exeter Book" occurs the passage-- "Sweet was the song of birds, The earth was covered with flowers, Cuckoos announced the year." [Sidenote: THE CRY OF THE CUCKOO] I did not see the bird, which lent enchantment to his song. I listened, with budding daisies at my feet, and over Wenlock spire a magic purple light. He seemed to me no bird, but a spirit calling to the world with a gladness that we cannot know. Death and winter must come, but for all that, spring is here, he seemed to say. Death had come near me, even touched me half an hour ago, but for all the solemn sadness I felt a brief time ago, the joy of life seized me afresh. As I wandered home across the peaceful fields, the Cuckoo's call seemed spoken and repeated from coppice to hedgerow, and in every mossy dingle. The old nursery rhyme I used to say in childhood came back to me-- "In April The Cuckoo shows his bill; In May He sings all day; In June He alters his tune; In July Away he'll fly; Come August Fly he must." Yes, I say, fly he must, with summer which is "the sovereign joy of all things," as Piers Ploughman wrote long years ago, and then autumn, and the long chill nights of winter. There is always a mystery about the cuckoo, as to where he comes from, and where he goes. Far down in the south of India, I have been told, is the only place where the cuckoo is to be found summer and winter alike, calling in the tropics his strange, mystic cry. Be this as it may, he is never with us in Shropshire till the second week in April, and vanishes like a ghost early in August. Some days later, and it was Palm Sunday, one of the great festivals of old England during the Middle Ages. There is but little sign left now of the blessing of the boughs, as the rite was performed in mediæval times, save that nearly all the boys present had cut sprigs of the wild willow and placed them in their button-holes, and my little maid, by her old Nana's wish, had a spray pinned in also, amongst the ribbons of her hat. What a lovely blossom it is, that of the wild willow. How delicate the soft grey, and how lovely the brilliant shades of gold. How wonderful is the mixture of both colours, and how exquisitely gold and grey melt into each other.