our less ideal yet hardly less lovely and welcome Spring is come at last: that Winter is old and broken and shuffling north, clinging to the bleak uplands and windygates: and this, even though Summer tarries still among the fields of France. Because of their association with solitary and waste places it is not strange that these harbingers of Swallow-time should everywhere have an evil repute. Even amid the unimaginative Sussex or Wilts peasants, the cry of the curlew, the wail of the lapwing, forebode sorrow, cover a vague menace: heard, at least, at dusk or at night, or in the grey gloaming at the edge of day. The Cornish or Devon moorlander has many wild tales of the whimbrel, whose swift-repeated whistle hurtling suddenly in lonely places has given rise to innumerable legends of the Seven Whistlers, the Demon Huntsmen, the Hunted Souls. In Iona and along the Earraid of Mull, where the whimbrel or ‘little curlew’ is rarely heard till May, though it is generally called _Guilbinnach_, a diminutive of the Gaelic name of the curlew, _Guilbin_ (pronounced sometimes _Kooley-pin_ or _guley-pin_ and sometimes _gwilley-pin_), a compound word signifying wailing music, I have heard it called _Guilbhròn_ (Kwillyvrone), Wail of Sorrow, and again ‘_Keenyvàs_’ or Death-Cry, and once, either in a tale or poem, by the singular name _Guilchaismeachd_, the Wail of Warning. Any lowland cottar, from west of Lammermuir to east of Ballantrae, will ’ken a wheen strange tales o’ the whaup,’ as the curlew is commonly called north of the Tweed and south of the Highland Line: and in some parts it is not only the children who shudder at its cry in lonely places at dusk, fearing ‘the bogle wi’ the lang neb’ like a pair of tongs, emissary of the Evil One, who gave this bird his long curved beak so that in the dark he might, like tongs lifting a stray coal or a nightjar snatching a wandering moth, carry off wrongdoers, unrepentant sinners, truants, and all naughty children generally. As for the lapwing, though more familiar than the curlew, and for many of us associated only with pastures and pleasant wilds, in the countries of the Gael dark things are whispered of the _Adharcan-luachrach_, or Little Horn of the Rushes ... thus poetically called from the pretty tuft of the male _weep_ or _peaseweep_, curving like a horn over the delicately poised head, and from the bird’s fondness for nesting in rushy places or among tangled grasses. Is he not said to be one of the bitter clan who mocked on the day of the Crucifixion, and so was made homeless for ever, with a cry that should be for ever like the cry of wandering sorrow? It is of little avail to say that love among the rushes is as sweet as elsewhere, that the wilderness can be home, and that the wailing of repentant souls may be no more than angry vituperations against the hoodie-crow or laughing-gull or other marauders after lapwing-eggs. Is the _weep_ not a spirit of the waste