It is the great spring chorus of the year, when every bird seems to sing his best, and vie with his fellow in the effort to produce the sweetest sounds. Once heard never forgotten, it is a something that the greatest traveller will tell you cannot be surpassed, while there are millions year by year, who from neglect or compulsion fail to hear, though the concert is free to every one who will trouble himself to get a place and fill his heart with joy that is without a care. When is this concert? Perhaps in April, perhaps in May. It is when the east wind ceases to dry, and the balmy south breathes sweetness over the awakened earth. It is indeed a "sensation" matchless in itself and particular to our land, though some such harmony must have greeted the senses of the first man when he opened his eyes to the flowers of the new-made earth, and drank in its sweets and joys. "My hands are hot," said Gil Carr, the Adam of the little Eden of a wilderness, as he thought upon his Eve; and returning to the stream once more, he dipped the bunch of forget-me-nots beneath the gurgling current, afterwards wrapping the stems round with the broad leaf of a dock, and walked away trying to imitate the piping of the nightingale, and wondering how long it would be before the glow-worms would begin to light their lamps in the soft warm evenings; while he smiled as he thought of the signals they had made upon the sloping bank that stretched up to the hedge of hawthorn fronting Mace's casement, where the pale white roses grew. Volume 1, Chapter II. HOW THE KING'S MESSENGER SOUGHT ROEHURST POOL IN JULY, AND WHAT HE SAW. "Sir Thomas, and if I did not feel bound to carry out my royal master's commands, I'd go no further, but sit down here on this shady bank, and bask in the sunshine of your daughter's eyes. Once more I say, is there any ending to this winding lane?" "Patience, Sir Mark; pray have patience," said portly Sir Thomas Beckley, baronet and justice of the peace, as he took off his sugar-loaf hat with its plume of cock's feathers, and wiped the great beads of perspiration from his pink brow. "Patience; and pray do not stuff my daughter's head with courtly phrases, or you will make her vain." "Patience? Why, Sir Thomas, it is for her sake I am speaking. This lane has gone up and down, and in and out, and backwards and forwards, till my heart aches more than my legs to see her pretty little feet getting wedged between stones, and her face flushed with toil." "Well, yes," said Sir Thomas, "the roads are rather bad down here in Sussex." "Bad, man? Why, they are abominable. They are as if cursed by witches. In winter they must be sloughs and pits for unwary feet." "This is but a by-road, Sir Mark," said the baronet, pompously. "By-road, indeed! Mistress Anne, why did you not have the carriage?"