Page:The Yellow Book - 05.djvu/84

74 inner ear of ours begins to revive and to record, one by one, the real facts of sound. The rooks are the first to assert themselves. All this time that we took to be so void of voice they have been volubly discussing every detail of domestic tree-life, as they rock and sway beside their nests in the elm-tops. To take in the varied chatter of rookdom would in itself be a full morning's occupation, from which the most complacent might rise humble and instructed. Unfortunately, their talk rarely tends to edification. The element of personality—the argumentum ad hominem—always crops up so fatally soon, that long ere a syllogism has been properly unrolled, the disputants have clinched on inadequate foothold, and flopped thence, dishevelled, into space. Somewhere hard by, their jackdaw cousins are narrating those smoking-room stories they are so fond of, with bursts of sardonic laughter at the close. For theology or the fine arts your jackdaw has little taste; but give him something sporting and spicy, with a dash of the divorce court, and no Sunday morning can ever seem too long. At intervals the drum of the woodpecker rattles out from the heart of a copse; while from every quarter birds are delivering each his special message to the great cheery-faced postman who is trudging his daily round over head, carrying good tidings to the whole bird-belt that encircles the globe. To all these wild, natural calls of the wood, the farmyard behind us responds with its more cultivated clamour and cackle; while the very atmosphere is resonant of its airy population, each of them blowing his own special trumpet. Silence, indeed! why, as the inner ear awakes and develops, the solid bulk of this sound-in-stillness becomes in its turn overpowering, terrifying. Let the development only continue, one thinks, but a little longer, and the very rush of sap, the thrust and foison of germination, will join in the din, and go far to deafen us. One shrinks, in fancy, to a dwarf of meanest aims and pettiest account before this army of full-blooded, Rh