singing, or silent. In natural history books, after we have been solemnly told that the male alone sings, that his song constitutes his courtship, and that, therefore, both the "she" and the "melancholy" of poets are incorrect, we are generally presented with a gaunt, scraggy-looking creature, having a woe-begone gaze which is fixed upon the moon, towards which its neck and whole body seem drawn out, as by some attractive force. This is the nightingale of convention, but when I have seen it, it has always looked the pleasingly plump, cheerful, little, brisk, active body that it really is, and when it sang it was without any "pose," in a hunched-up, careless-looking attitude, which had almost a feathered podginess about it. The legs were bent, the feathers of the ventral surface touching, or almost touching, the twig of perch, the head inclining forward at an easy angle—a cosy, homely, happy, contented appearance. I have watched one singing thus for some time. Not once did he rear himself up, so as to become long, thin, and tubey—tubby he was rather, and had not the faintest resemblance to a horrible, man-made, first-prize-for-deformity canary bird. Just in the same way, too, he will often sing on the ground, looking as homely and rotund as can be. True it is, as the natural history books tell us, that no one familiar with the bird and its habits would think of calling it or its song melancholy; therefore (as these never add), remembering Milton's famous line, let us be thankful that he as well as some other poets were not familiar with it. There has long been a nightingale of poetry and literature, grown out of its own song but having little to do with the real bird, which no one except strict scientists—and
