After a while, the young thrushes would wake up and begin chirping, and then the mother would get madder than ever.

“Can’t you say something to him?” she would cry indignantly to her husband.  “How do you think the children can get to sleep, poor things, with that hideous row going on all night?  Might just as well be living in a saw-mill.”

Thus adjured, the male thrush would put his head over the nest, and call out in a nervous, apologetic manner:—­

“I say, you know, you there, I wish you wouldn’t mind being quiet a bit.  My wife says she can’t get the children to sleep.  It’s too bad, you know, ’pon my word it is.”

“Gor on,” the corncrake would answer surlily.  “You keep your wife herself quiet; that’s enough for you to do.”  And on he would go again worse than before.

Then a mother blackbird, from a little further off, would join in the fray.

“Ah, it’s a good hiding he wants, not a talking to.  And if I was a cock, I’d give it him.” (This remark would be made in a tone of withering contempt, and would appear to bear reference to some previous discussion.)

“You’re quite right, ma’am,” Mrs. Thrush would reply.  “That’s what I tell my husband, but” (with rising inflection, so that every lady in the plantation might hear) “he wouldn’t move himself, bless you—­no, not if I and the children were to die before his eyes for want of sleep.”

“Ah, he ain’t the only one, my dear,” the blackbird would pipe back, “they’re all alike”; then, in a voice more of sorrow than of anger:—­“but there, it ain’t their fault, I suppose, poor things.  If you ain’t got the spirit of a bird you can’t help yourself.”

I would strain my ears at this point to hear if the male blackbird was moved at all by these taunts, but the only sound I could ever detect coming from his neighbourhood was that of palpably exaggerated snoring.

By this time the whole glade would be awake, expressing views concerning that corncrake that would have wounded a less callous nature.

“Blow me tight, Bill,” some vulgar little hedge-sparrow would chirp out, in the midst of the hubbub, “if I don’t believe the gent thinks ’e’s a-singing.”

“’Tain’t ’is fault,” Bill would reply, with mock sympathy.  “Somebody’s put a penny in the slot, and ’e can’t stop ’isself.”

Irritated by the laugh that this would call forth from the younger birds, the corncrake would exert himself to be more objectionable than ever, and, as a means to this end, would commence giving his marvellous imitation of the sharpening of a rusty saw by a steel file.

But at this an old crow, not to be trifled with, would cry out angrily:—­

“Stop that, now.  If I come down to you I’ll peck your cranky head off, I will.”

And then would follow silence for a quarter of an hour, after which the whole thing would begin again.

CHAPTER V