Birds of Town and Village | Page 3

was a long green hill, the ascent to which was gentle; but on the further
side it sloped abruptly down to the Thames.
On the left hand there was another hill, with cottages and orchards,
with small fields interspersed on the slope and summit, so that the
middle part, where I lodged, was in a pretty deep hollow. There was no
sound of traffic there, and few farmers' carts came that way, as it was
well away from the roads, and the deep, narrow, winding lanes were
exceedingly rough, like the stony beds of dried-up streams.
In the deepest part of the coombe, in the middle of the village, there
was a well where the cottagers drew their water; and in the summer
evenings the youths and maidens came there, with or without jugs and
buckets, to indulge in conversation, which was mostly of the rustic,
bantering kind, mixed with a good deal of loud laughter. Close by was
the inn, where the men sat on benches in the tap-room in grave
discourse over their pipes and beer.
Wishing to make their acquaintance, I went in and sat down among
them, and found them a little shy--not to say stand-offish, at first.
Rustics are often suspicious of the stranger within their gates; but after
paying for beer all round, the frost melted and we were soon deep in
talk about the wild life of the place; always a safe and pleasant subject
in a village. One rough-looking, brown-faced man, with iron-grey hair,
became a sort of spokesman for the company, and replied to most of
my questions.
"And what about badgers?" I asked. "In such a rough-looking spot with
woods and all, it strikes me as just the sort of place where one would
find that animal."
A long dead silence followed. I caught the eye of the man nearest me
and repeated the question, "Are there no badgers here?" His eyes fell,

then he exchanged glances with some of the others, all very serious;
and at length my man, addressing the person who had acted as
spokesman before, said, "Perhaps you'll tell the gentleman if there are
any badgers here."
At that the rough man looked at me very sharply, and answered stiffly,
"Not as I know of."
A few weeks later, at a small town in the neighbourhood, I got into
conversation with a hotel keeper, an intelligent man, who gave me a
good deal of information about the country. He asked me where I was
staying, and, on my telling him, said "Ah, I know it well--that village in
a hole; and a very nasty hole to get in, too--at any rate it was so,
formerly. They are getting a bit civilized now, but I remember the time
when a stranger couldn't show himself in the place without being jeered
at and insulted. Yes, they were a rough lot down in that hole--the
Badgers, they were called, and that's what they are called still."
The pity of it was that I didn't know this before I went among them!
But it was not remembered against me that I had wounded their
susceptibilities; they soon found that I was nothing but a harmless field
naturalist, and I had friendly relations with many of them.
At the extremity of the straggling village was the beginning of an
extensive common, where it was always possible to spend an hour or
two without seeing a human creature. A few sheep grazed and browsed
there, roaming about in twos and threes and half-dozens, tearing their
fleeces for the benefit of nest-building birds, in the great tangled
masses of mingled furze and bramble and briar. Birds were abundant
there--all those kinds that love the common's openness, and the rough,
thorny vegetation that flourishes on it. But the village--or rather, the
large open space occupied by it, formed the headquarters and centre of
a paradise of birds (as I soon began to think it), for the cottages and
houses were widely separated, the meanest having a garden and some
trees, and in most cases there was an old orchard of apple, cherry, and
walnut trees to each habitation, and out of this mass of greenery, which
hid the houses and made the place look more like a wood than a village,
towered the great elms in rows, and in groups.
On first approaching the place I heard, mingled with many other voices,
that of the nightingale; and as it was for the medicine of its pure, fresh
melody that I particularly craved, I was glad to find a lodging in one of

the cottages, and to remain there for several weeks.
The small care which the nightingale took to live up to his reputation in
this place surprised me a little. Here he could always be