come off the nest to feed on crumbs below our windows, I heard her warble a few notes between mouthfuls shortly before she returned. It has lately been ascertained by a patient observer that female robins sometimes sing. Such scanty evidence does not permit one to dogmatise, but the question deserves investigation. Owing to the close resemblance between the sexes, the point can only be decided by very careful watching.

Our pair of woodlarks was delightfully tame, and this, of course, made it much easier to watch them. My observations of the young or eggs were always made at times when I had seen the bird leave the nest. I was careful never to frighten her by putting her off it, and kept the grass all round it uncut. Woodlarks had haunted our land ever since the preceding autumn, and before they nested had become accustomed to feed on crumbs spilled from our bird-table by greedy and quarrelsome chaffinches. They were accustomed to our presence. The cock would not trouble to move from his adjacent perch when I approached the vicinity of the nest or was working near by in my garden, and after the first occasion they did not seem to resent my examining the nestling young. I only once saw a woodlark perch actually on our bird-table. He stayed ten minutes. Perching on the low parapet which surrounds the board, his long yellow hind claw stretched down its whole length, like a long yellow thread, he ate potato and butter ravenously, but cleaned his bill very carefully afterwards. At the end of his repast he sang a short grace and retired with a piece of potato, perhaps as a tit-bit for one of his family. Early in May I twice noticed woodlarks pulling off blades of green grass and swallowing them. Possibly there were grubs concealed in the shoots. I at first supposed that they were collecting material for their nest, but I am quite certain that they did not carry the grass away.

The song certainly continued after the young were hatched, but it was not so frequent, nor was its volume so great. It ceased altogether at the end of July, and I did not hear it again until the middle of September; in fact, for about a month from the second week in August I saw no woodlarks on our land. At this time most of them retire to the cornfields, where I have several times put up small family parties.

Though the woodlark's music probably reaches its highest pitch of beauty in the spring, yet there are times when the autumn song seems, after so long a silence, richer even than the April melody; it certainly has some new phrases, and some of them, particularly a throbbing shake upon one note, recall the nightingale even more vividly than the spring-time ecstasies. Listening to the song again quite recently, I felt less surprise at my having wondered whether I was not listening to some late singing Philomel

when I heard the song first, some fourteen years ago. This bird, pranked out in beautifully fresh and clean plumage after his autumn moult, sang almost on end for a quarter of an hour one September morning from a heap of dead grass not more than twenty yards from my bedroom window. I was amazed and thrilled by the wonderful sweetness and endless variety of the song. At this time of year so much melody cannot have any relation to mating, nor, since woodlarks remain in small parties throughout the autumn, can it well be attributed to territorial arrogance. It must surely be pure joie de vivre.

What is it that endears one bird to us more than another? We admire the nightingale, not only for its moonlight melodies, but for the romance which poets and lovers have woven around it. We wonder at the peregrine's amazing mastery of the air and courage in pursuit and attack. The crow tribe intrigue us by their cleverness and spice of devilry. But it is rarely that one gets the opportunity of becoming intimate with any of these birds in a wild state, and it is only under these conditions that one can be sure of knowing the real bird. It is his confidingness that has made the robin the most popular of our English birds, and it is this trait, too, which has now given the woodlark a special niche in my affections; true, his song, which cheers us often when all other birds are silent, makes a special appeal as well; but when one has given attention to a bird almost daily all the year round, and has learned to know him in all his moods, his loves, his hates, his fears, and his feuds, when one has watched with solicitude over his domestic adventures, he becomes a friend. We grow to learn a little, perhaps a very little, of—

The secrets held by creatures nearer than we

To earth . . . and the link of their life with ours;
And where alike we are, unlike where, and the veined
Division, veined parallel, of a blood that flows
In them, in us, from the source by man unattained

Save marks he well what the mystical woods disclose.

Watching and learning thus, one may avoid the errors both of the dry-as-dust to whom a bird is nothing but a stuffed mummy in a glass case, or a cured skin in a specimen cabinet, and of the sentimentalist who attributes to the feathered people his own neurotic sensibilities. The complete Nature-lover should endeavour to deserve the epitaph :

He saw life steadily, and saw it whole.

E. W. HENDY (Ernest Blake).

VOL. XCVII-No. 579

3 B

MAYERS, MAYINGS, AND MAYPOLES

'IN the month of May, namely on Mayday in the morning,' says an old writer,' every man, except impediment, would walke into the sweet meddowes and green woods, there to rejoyce their spirits with the beauty and savour of sweet flowers and with the harmonie of birds praising God in their kinde.'

And very charming are some of the glimpses one gets of 'maying' in olden days, as when one reads how the young King, Henry VIII., a prince most gay and debonnaire, and his girl wife Katharine-no ugly clouds on the horizon, no grossness yet in evidence-rode with their lords and ladies from Greenwich to Shooters Hill to bring in the May.' On the way they fell in with 200 archers, clad all in green, with bows and arrows (doubtless a planned fantasy), whose chieftain was called Robin Hood, and who begged the courtly cavalcade to halt and see his men shoot. Then at his whistle the archers all loosed together, and yet a second time did they shoot, and their arrows flying overhead made a noise, says the chronicler, that was' strange and loud, which greatly delighted the King, Queen, and their company.' Queen Elizabeth, too, loved her Maydays, and even in the last spring of her life, as an old woman, went a-maying to Sir Richard Buckley's at Lewisham. Butmaying' by the Court was no new thing in Tudor days; it was but the keeping up of an ancient custom, for a couple of centuries earlier Chaucer tells how on a Mayday morning

Forth goeth al the courte both moste and leste

To fetche the floures freshe and braunche and blome.

Officialdom was no whit behind the Court in its observance of Mayday. In the reign of Henry VI. the Aldermen and Sheriffs of London spent one, at least, of their Mayday mornings at the Bishop of London's Wood, in the parish of Stebunheath, where their celebration took the very characteristic form of a 'worshipfull dinner for themselves and other commers,' though a touch of idealism was added by the poet Lydgate, a monk of Bury, sending to them a joyfull commendation of that season containing sixteen staves in meeter royall.' One wonders whether they delayed

dinner to read it or heard it in the satisfaction of repletion afterwards. On another occasion we read of them going out to join the King (Henry VIII.) and his Court in their maying at Shooters Hill.

Then, again, from time immemorial the first day of May would seem to have been the great countryside festival, when young men and maidens of all degrees went out into the woods long before dawn and came home in the very early morning, laden with flowers and branches of greenery of every kind, accompanied by the beating of drums, the blowing of horns, and other 'May music.' These branches were put up over the doorways of the houses, so that the whole village or township became a bower of fresh green. Herrick's well-known verses to Corinna on Mayday refer to this pretty custom :

Come, my Corinna, come, and coming mark

How each field turns a street and each street a park
Made green and trimmed with trees; see how

Devotion gives each house a bough

Or branch; each porch, each door ere this
An ark or tabernacle is,

Made up of whitethorn neatly interwove.

Sir Henry Piers, writing somewhat later (1682), records, in his Description of Wastmeath, that each family used to set before their door a green bush to celebrate the May, while in some parts, e.g., Northamptonshire, tall, slender trees were erected, one before each house, and flowers thrown about them.

The origin of this Mayday festival is generally derived from the Floralia, or floral games, of the Romans, which used to take place at this season in honour of Flora, goddess of flowers; but without doubt the idea underlying it is still more remote and subtle, and must be referred back to the dim ages of antiquity when tree worship was practised and every tree was believed to be the home of a beneficent tree-spirit. So'bringing in the May' was not, in the beginning, merely the ebullition of high spirits natural to the season, but a religious ceremony, a survival of tree worship, and performed with the intention of bringing this beneficent spirit to the homes of the people. In the course of time the custom lost its beautiful meaning, and, with the loss of meaning, degradation inevitably followed.

Before one goes on to look more closely into these Mayday celebrations of our forefathers one very material fact must be called to mind. Prior to the revision of the calendar in 1752, when eleven days were dropped out of it, May the 1st-Mayday-was really our May the 12th. This means much at this season of bursting leaf and flower, and Maydays before the revision had a far better chance of being idyllic both as to sunshine and blossom than had those after it. The hawthorn, for instance, has always

been definitely associated with Mayday-indeed, it is may' to the countryfolk-and Chaucer particularly mentions that it was specially brought back by both page and groom' when the Court went a-maying. Yet to-day the hawthorn is not in full bloom at Mayday; and one really wants the hawthorn in its complete bridal dress over the countryside if one is to capture the true May spirit, when the sense of joy is at its zenith, the zest of life at its keenest. For, as Swinburne so truly says:

The coming of the Hawthorn brings on earth Heaven.

All the Spring speaks out in one sweet word,

And Heaven grows gladder, knowing that Earth has heard.

May revellers in addition to being accompanied by musicians often had with them various other figures dressed to represent Flora, Robin Hood, Little John and the rest of that band, ‘lords' and ladies,' and so on. These took part in the revels afterwards. Spenser, in his delightful description of The Shepherd's Maying,' speaks of

Lady Flora on whom did attend

A fair flock of fairies and a fresh bend
Of lovely nymphs

as being among the mayers.

Flora, represented by the prettiest girl, later became the Queen of the May,' crowned with flowers and throned aside in a flowery bower, but taking no part in the actual games, the honour compensating for what must have been rather a dull part.

Further, in Tudor times at any rate, in addition to the branches carried by all, a great maytree or maypole was brought in to be the centre of the revels. Phillip Stubbes, in his Anatomie of Abuses, published in 1584, gives an excellent description of how this was done, though he sternly disapproved of the whole proceedings. They have,' he wrote, ' twenty or thirty yoke of oxen, every oxe having a sweet nosegay of flowers placed on the tip of his hornes and these oxen drawe home this Maypole' (here, I regret to say, he refers to it as 'this stinkyng ydol!'), ' which is covered all over with flowers and hearbs, bound round with strings from the top to the bottome, and sometime painted with variable colours, with two or three hundred men, women and children following it with great devotion. And thus being reared up, with handkercheefs and flags hovering on the top, they straw the ground ronde about, binde green boughs about it, set up sommer haules, bowers and arbors hard by it. And then fall they to daunce about it' (and here his bitterness once more breaks out) 'like as the heathen people did at the dedication of the idols, whereof this is a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself.' He was firmly convinced that the Lord over their pastimes and sportes' was Sathan, prince of hel,' and he explains his abhor