now well past six o'clock, and the sun was growing hot, so there was nothing for it but to row stoutly back to Dermendereh, and say good-bye to the bass of the Gulf.

The expedition was a memorable one to myself, for during years of residence at Constantinople I had scores of times pursued the wily "leverack," as the bass is called in Turkish, and had never brought back one of more than three pounds, or more than three fish, at any one time. Yet at this impromptu attempt I had landed twelve, and lost three or four more, including the Blackwood's Magazine.

It is

hero of the tragedy just related. true, however, that I had never been in the famous Gulf waters, and from all that I saw and heard, I believe that an experience like the foregoing, or even more brilliant, awaits any patient and early-rising fisherman who trusts to the local knowledge of his professional, and can put up with ways that are often crooked, and customs that are not always pleasing. But a man will bear with a good deal for fifteen and twenty pound bass as a prospective re

ward.

Ardern Hulme Beaman.

The perching birds have so thoroughly disappeared under the leaves of complete spring that we must know them by their voices to know them at all. There is a pollard oak, the crown of which makes no mean room wherein to sit and read a book. The boughs, merely fifty years old, shoot up from the secular trunk like trees themselves, and, together with a certain spot in the hedge below, constitute a world to a pair of willow wrens. Here they come every few minutes to gather caterpillars, and here the male sometimes gives way to song a little shorter than his April solo to show that he is whistling almost while he works. Though the oak is the last of our trees to burgeon, the leaves are already so thick that it is difficult to see a reflection of the mouse-like movements of the willow wrens, and you can never see the cock when he is singing. The blackbird sang in the ash till it smothered him with its green, and the thrush, having given up the last attempt to let all the world know that it is he, sings like the others, unseen.

Hundreds of people have heard the nightingale for every one who has seen

it, and there is the widest divergence of opinion as to its size, shape, and color. Those who have only known it from the picture of an elegant and pathetic bird dreamily silhouetted against a full moon wonder what that red bird can be that, with cocked tail, and a perfect fury of manner, dashes out from the thicket and in again almost before you have seen it. Still more puzzled are they when, from the depth of a hedge at mid-day, comes a portion of that song so admirably verbalized by the French peasant:Le bon Dieu m'a donné une femme, Que j'ai tant, tant, tant battu... S'il me donnera une autre, · Je ne la batterai plus, plus, plus, Qu'un petit.

He has his twilight all day long under the leaves. Perhaps he is the daylight singing-master to the garden warbler and the whitethroat, perhaps he has learned a little from them, though if some notes are borrowed either way, they are dissolved in an individual alchemy that makes the song of each entirely its own. cially is that seen when there rattles through the branches the crisp and

Espe

tumultuous clatter that the initiate knows for the song of the blackcap. The blackcap is Ireland's nightingale, it occupies the western and northern country, to which the nightingale does not go, but it also challenges the world of song throughout nightingale-land. It belongs quite evidently to the whitethroat school of music. There is nothing of the softer sentiments about the blackcap's song. It is rather in the style of "heroes' hot corpses heaped high for my pillow." It is a sunshine song, and the bird will sing it to you perched on an open twig, its head bent low and forward, as though it were prepared to charge at a moment's notice. Another has been singing from the prosaic stand of a telegraph wire this morning, very much to the neglect, perhaps, of his household duties.

The blackcap's song is pure music, but the whitethroat is surely a seriocomic. He can sing the family trill with anyone, but in order to show you that he thinks little of it, he intersperses it with "churs" and "pshahs" like spoken swearwords in the middle of an operatic song. "Heroes' hot corpses (I'll show yeh) heaped high for my pillow," he seems to sing and shout. He puffs out his throat till he seems to wag a beard; he sings flying and, apparently, in the midst of flycatching; he soars like the meadow pipit, or like the ball that dances on a jet of water; he dashes back into his hedge quite unexpectedly, and you have no idea when or where he is coming out. The whitethroat, the orangetip butterfly, and a hedge smothered in fool's parsley, make the essential picture of a summer day, and when the sun shines hot there is something almost physically cooling in those odd noises with which the whitethroat sprinkles contempt on his really wonderful powers of song.

Some would think that the wryneck

must be a pupil of the nightingale. Its sweet and pensive "tiu-tiu-tiu-tiutiu-tiu-tiu" resembles the "plus-plusplus" of the nightingale, though it leads to nothing further. That is the whole song of the wryneck, a quiet note of content that, because it is also a little sad, some have called a shriek, whence they have scientifically christened the bird the shrieker. What has a woodpecker to do with a song like that? It is a laugh, a silvery ripple of laughter (through tears) by comparison with the guffaw of the "laughing yaffle" but still a laugh. It would probably be found to resemble a little closely the song of the North American "flicker" if the two birds could be brought to sing side by side. The flicker is the rain-bird, as the yaffle is our rain-bird, and calls "wet, wet, wet," apparently seven times, just as the wryneck does. The voices of the birds are as certain an index to their family relationship as their plumage, habits, or anatomy. The ancient Britons carved stones to let posterity know where they had been. The stones have perished, but we know today the descendants of the ancient Britons from their peculiar way of pronouncing certain words taken by them, in common with others, from the Roman tongue. And by its song, the chaffinch claims a relationship to the buntings apparently closer than the anatomist is disposed to allow. The yellow bunting sings all day long and every day its very modest demand for bread-and-no-cheese, the chaffinch sings about something or other and "cheer" which might almost as well be "cheese," the greenfinch, which men will have is a green linnet, sings, almost as continuously as the yellowhammer, "cheese" and nothing else. The brambling, whose summer home is in Norway, but who has been detained here in an aviary, makes the same family demand, and the snow

bunting, the most alpine of all our winter birds, has for its call "a stifled scream."

The meadow pipits play a game of their own of "hidden in sight." As soon as we come into the field they begin scolding us, and if we stayed there all day they would not leave off. It is not easy to tell whether there are ten of them or only two. The cry, which is something like the clinking of two stones, comes now from this side, now from the other, now near, now far, and yet no bird may have moved meanwhile, and there may be but one bird calling. There are gray stones everywhere, and on one of them a gray bird is sitting and cheating us with the most elusive sound in nature. It is the sound used in the game wherein a blind-folded person has to guess in what direction another is clinking two half-crowns together. Most of the young birds have it, whether in the nest or sitting invisible on twigs, and calling for the food they ought to be learning to catch. The young robins of a second brood are sitting in the garden, invisible, on spade handles and fence rails and calling from every place where they are not. The young blackbirds have the trick, and sit in even more conspicu

The Nation.

ous places almost as invisible as the robins.

The turtle dove croons and croons in a maple thicket all day, but he must go very softly and have keen eyes who would see it on its perch. The crooning stops before we are half-way across the field, but the bird often sits tight till we begin to part the leaves. We cannot always have the satisfaction of seeing it fly off. Though it belongs to a tribe with a clattering flight, it often manages to steal away without being either seen or heard. Still more elusive is the nightjar, sitting silent till nearly trodden on by day, and at eve droning out its elusive rattle from some pine branch no more umbrageous than it was in winter. By day and by night too, the corncrake runs through its bower of mowinggrass, its harsh cry now swinging to the far end of the field, now rattling in our very ears, till we think we could jump on the bird to a certainty, yet no sight of it is to be had. If we had never seen a corncrake, what man'ner of beast should we imagine it to be.

Perhaps an unusually elusive cricket, with an astonishingly loud fiddle. Like Wordsworth's cuckoo and most of the other birds at the edge of June, it is just "a wandering voice."

The Census figures for the last decade remind the nation once more of the terrible conditions which prevail in our purely country districts, and which are due mainly, if not entirely, to the economic policy we have pursued for nearly seventy years. The people of this country have never approved this process of rural devastation. They were assured by the promoters of the free importing movement in the for

LIVING AGE. VOL. LII. 2709

ties of last century that agriculture would benefit rather than suffer from "free trade," that, in Cobden's words, not a single acre of land would go out of cultivation. We know how these prophecies have been fulfilled. As large an area has gone out of cultivation as the entire area now under cultivation. The countryfolk have been driven, mainly by the stress of economic causes, from the fields to the

towns, the loss of rural laborers amounting to no fewer than a million. Under the stupid and disastrous domination of laisser faire our agriculture has declined as fast as our industrial wealth has increased. The objects and ideals of the free-trade pioneers were purely material. For welfare, as distinguished from wealth, there was little thought or care. The not undeserved result is that we have in this country to-day social problems on a scale and of a character to which no other great civilized Power can show any parallel. Instead of the Briton, the foreign agriculturist has reaped the main benefit of our progress in manufactures and population. While England has elected to stand on one leg, Germany, France, and other great States have brought forward their agriculture pari passu with their manufacturing industries. They offer employment to their people with both hands. As our consuls in Germany never cease to remind us, Germany possesses in her flourishing country population a great market within her own frontier, which serves her in good stead in times of world-depression of trade and gives steadiness to her whole economic system.

No one can mistake the meaning of the Census figures just published. Their significance does not consist in a fall from 12 to 11 per cent. in the rate of increase, but in the comparative increases of town and country. Where a county shows an advance in population the advance is invariably urban and not rural. For example. Essex, Middlesex, Surrey, and Hertfordshire owe their increases to the 'new tentacles which London is always pushing out into further suburbs. So the large increases in Worcestershire and Warwickshire are due to the expansion of Birmingham, while Manchester and Liverpool bring up the fig'ures for Lancashire. This is not part

of a general movement of "back to the land," but a further encroachment of the towns and suburbs upon the countrysides. If we turn to the more purely rural counties we find the deadly process clearly revealed. West Suffolk, Cardiganshire, Carnarvonshire, Merionethshire. Montgomery, Cumberland, Westmorland have all lost population, while Cornwall, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Huntingdon, Shropshire, Norfolk, and Northampton have done little more than mark time. Turning to the great towns we find, on the other hand, a generally substantial rise, Coventry leading with her enormous figure of 52 per cent. Nothing could be more clearly established than that the towns are still sucking the lifeblood from the countrysides without providing any economic compensation whatever. Thus the sounder and healthier part of our population undergoes a perpetual depletion, which is further assisted by the efforts of emigration agents, who find the soil for their persuasive arts only too well prepared for them.

Here, then, is a problem of a pressing nature, and large enough to tax the efforts of the wisest and strongest statesman. What is the present Government doing towards its solution? It has talked a great deal about "re-colonizing England," and it has passed a Small Holdings Act which, as everybody foresaw, has been a signal failure, and it is contemplating other superficial measures of the kind. But as the Liberal Party refuses to acknowledge the obvious cause in this country of rural decline, so it refuses to apply the obvious and only remedy-namely, a revisal of that fiscal system which has blighted our once fertile acres and emptied the country villages into the towns. Unless we can secure to the cultivator a decent price for his produce, and give him something that it will pay him to produce, all such de

vices as small tenancies, land banks, credit banks, and co-operative schemes will be little better than useless. Unless we restore to the land something of its old economic value, the most generous and impartial redistribution of it in the hands of either small tenants or small owners will never make the wilderness blossom like the rose.

Until the nation realizes that it was grievously deluded by Cobden and the other inspired manufacturers of the Anti-Corn Law League, and that socalled free trade, as was abundantly foretold by Disraeli, Bentinck, and other opponents of the League, has worked the ruin of our English agriculture, no beginnings of reform can be made. And where is the English party-leader who is going to carry facts of this kind to the mobs of urban electors? Where is the ambitious politician who dares to say to the industrial voter, not "Your food will cost you more," but "Your food ought to cost you more"? The very process which has driven the worker from the country to the town has concentrated political power in the hands of the urban electors, and the Liberal Party will take good care that these are not tempted to pay a little more for the necessities of life in return for certain great national, Imperial, and defensive advantages.

It is quite irrelevant for the latterday Cobdenite to refer to the big figures The Outlook.

of our foreign trade. That only points the moral of the poet-economist's warning to States "where wealth accumulates and men decay." Until some English Bismarck arises with a healthy contempt for party divisions and a healthy determination to carry this great social reform or revolution against all antagonisms, present tendencies must continue, and the next Census will show the course of rural depopulation still further advanced. Liberals will continue to preach the necessity of dirt-cheap food at all costs, and Unionists will whittle down their policy to suit electoral needs, as, for example, when they promised the urban proletariate that under fiscal reform Colonial corn should still pour in duty free. It looks as though nothing but the pressure of some dire disaster would teach Englishmen what it means for a State to be dependent on the outside world for three-quarters of its food-supplies, and to have made material wealth its main object and ideal over a long period of seventy years. There is truth as well as exaggeration in the well-known pronouncement of the English poet

That trade's proud Empire hastes to swift decay,

3.

obtain the story in which the Bhargeist appears? Answers: (a) Vanda. Ghost with bleeding finger. (b) Vale Royal, in Cheshire.

"That means she does not forgive him at all." Whose pious sentiment provoked this criticism, from