In the Garden
This is the time when the wheel of life slows down and the spokes are no longer a whirl of multi-coloured flame. The year at its apex has a moment of contemplative suspension. The gardener too straightens his back and mops his brow ; he has been picking soft fruit and, an innocent Macbeth, lifts fingers dyed in the vats of high summer. Like the year he looks and listens and, if he is lucky (as I was), he hears something more than the grating uproar of the aeroplanes, the prowling sharks of the air.
When the close season for song was a month old, the goldfinch that frequents my garden gave me a quarter of an hour of sustained aria in an ash-tree just over my head. Coward calls the song " clear, sweet and loud for so small a bird," and certainly the whole landscape was " overflowing with the sound." But I should not call this blithe and happy-go-lucky singing "clear.". The clear-voiced singers are 'blackbird, blackcap, garden warbler, Dartford warbler, marsh warbler, willow- warbler, nightingale, linnet (partially so), wood-lark and curlew. I stip- pose that the clearest of all bird-voices is that of the bell-bird or campanero of South America. But the goldfinch's song is not at all limpid or transparent. It is leafy, not aerial ; sibilant, not vowelled. In the evening beams it had the gleam and -scintillation of a sudden shower upon the thirsty garden. I have been trying my hand this year at growing open-air melons and with a fayouring summer and some coaxing from me they are doing as well as can be expected. Recently I clapped the barn cloches on them and have kept them moist by sinking flower-pots into the clay 'and letting ditch-water of an ancient fish-like smell slowly percolate through them. Slow is the key-word: the plants are healthy enough and the leaves taut, butohey are so confoundedly tardy in growth. Slow as a Test-batsman at the crease, slower to blossom than Gilbert White's Timothy to put his horny nose out into the spring air.
H. J. MASS1NGHAM.
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