While I lingered away the latter half of May in Scotland, and the first
half of June in northern England, and finally in London, intent on
seeing the land leisurely and as the mood suited, the thought never
occurred to me that I was in danger of missing one of the chief
pleasures I had promised myself in crossing the Atlantic, namely, the
hearing of the song of the nightingale. Hence, when on the 17th of June
I found myself down among the copses near Hazlemere, on the borders of
Surrey and Sussex, and was told by the old farmer, to whose house I had
been recommended by friends in London, that I was too late, that the
season of the nightingale was over, I was a good deal disturbed.
"I think she be done singing now, sir; I ain't heered her in some time,
sir," said my farmer, as we sat down to get acquainted over a mug of the
hardest cider I ever attempted to drink.
"Too late!" I said in deep chagrin, "and I might have been here weeks
ago."
"Yeas, sir, she be done now; May is the time to hear her. The cuckoo is
done too, sir; and you don't hear the nightingale after the cuckoo is
gone, sir."
(The country people in this part of England _sir_ one at the end of
every sentence, and talk with an indescribable drawl.)
But I had heard a cuckoo that very afternoon, and I took heart from the
fact. I afterward learned that the country people everywhere associate
these two birds in this way; you will not hear the one after the other
has ceased. But I heard the cuckoo almost daily till the middle of July.
Matthew Arnold reflects the popular opinion when in one of his poems
("Thyrsis") he makes the cuckoo say in early June,--
"The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I!"