The Nightingales An the protests died away, Ise June night-sounds
returned, like the reflections to a pond that has been disturbed by a stone. Once more the night-jar, the crickets, the faint eolian lipping in the telephone wires—and the nightingales! I have never known such a year for nightingales. Normally I have to go over to a chestnut wood down the western side of the hill to hear one or two. This year they have come up to the cherry orchard, close to the home. J counted a chorus of five, staged in strophe and anti-strophe round the paraffin shed at the back of the little shop which stands with half a dozen cottages to make our hamlet. What a music it is. Time and familiarity can never quite spoil the rapture of that legendary and legend-making song. It still comes warm from the Greek Anthology, and still I can see John Keats sitting under the mul- berry tree at Hampstead, recording his impressions and thus making another immortality of youth and its unattainable dreams.
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