Here, at least in spring
time, of all places in Europe, may a man feed his ears with song of
birds. The copses by the Gave, the public walks and woods (wherein
English prejudices have happily protected what is elsewhere shot down
as game, even to the poor little cock-robins whose corpses lie by
dozens in too many French markets), are filled with all our English
birds of passage, finding their way northwards from Morocco and
Algiers; and with our English nightingales, black-caps, willow-wrens,
and whitethroats, are other songsters which never find their way to
these isles, for which you must consult the pages of Mr. Gould or Mr.
Bree--and chief among them the dark Orpheus, and the yellow
Hippolais, surpassing the black-cap, and almost equalling the
nightingale, for richness and variety of song--the polyglot warbler
which penetrates, in summer, as far north as the shores of the
British Channel, and there stops short, scared by the twenty miles of
sea, after a land journey--and by night, too, as all the warblers
journey--from Africa.
At Pau, the railroad ended when I was there; and who would go
eastward had to take carriage, and go by the excellent road (all
public roads in the south of France are excellent, and equal to our
best English roads) over the high Landes to Tarbes; and on again over
fresh Landes to Montrejeau; and thence by railway to Toulouse.
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