Still the beautiful clouds lie over the downs, the larks are singing, the wheat rising green. There is hope in the wide and open sky.

II. STRANGE BIRDS

Standing by the parapet of London Bridge as it shuddered under the wheels of omnibuses, my feet cold on the pavement, I could imagine the wild eyes of an ancient Briton, suddenly brought back to life, filling with terror that the stars had fallen by the river, their vast flickering glares casting shadows about strange cliffs arisen where the forest was. The sun and the moon had fallen, too, and lay shattered and gleaming on the water; the whole sky hung with a haze of fire. And then out of this strange and dreadful scene arose a wild sweet note, startlingly near, passing in the night; another followed, and the spirit flew up with the familiar voices, away from this place where the grass had been dead so long and no trees grew.

I leaned on the cold stone of the parapet. The arc lamps blazed over the ships alongside the wharves, casting a coppery dust of light on cranes and rigging and burdened men. It was a usual night scene in the world's greatest port. The beautiful cries were gone, beaten under by the gigantic meaningless roar coming out of the stone and iron of the city.

London is old, but the spirit of earth is older, and its wild birds sometimes return to their ancient river haunts. There used to be a kingfisher flying over the reservoir by Hammersmith Bridge, to perch on a snag before the house of William Morris. I saw it twice in 1920, but I have not been there since. I dare say the bird is gone with the black branch in the mud. In flight over the tidal water it drew such a bright line, brilliant blue in the sunlight

as it flew away and ruddy brown as it returned. If thought could give it life, it would be there now, fishing the water's verge for sticklebacks and beetles and shrimps, for all the children to see.

London is the less confining for me when I know that brown owls nest every year in the elms of Hyde Park. Last spring, as I was wandering under one of the great old trees, my hat was struck off my head by the talons of a hen bird whose nest was in the hollow of a branch above. She flew out in the brightest sunlight with her eyes fully opened, alighted halfway up another tree, and uttered her sharp cries of te-jick, te-jick. As I lingered under her nest, she flew down again in a swooping curve and would have struck my face if I had not turned my back and ducked. In her frenzy of protection she struck with her whole body, throwing herself at me behind the spread claws of her feet and falling to the ground with the shock.

I have seen woodpeckers in the Park, both the green and the greater-spotted birds; but I have never heard the yaffling laugh of the one or the beak drumming of the other— the mating calls. Perhaps the birds were solitary, or visitants from outlying woods. I searched many of the trees, failing to find any nesting hole or litter of gouged chips beneath.

The little owl (Athene noctua) has now strayed into London. Early one morning I saw a bird on the rim of the plash around the eastern fountain of Trafalgar Square; it was staring at the sparrows under the pedestal of the Nelson Column. It flew quickly toward them, snatched one in its claws, and bore it off squealing in the direction of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields. It is quite possible that many of these owls nest in spring on the roofs of London houses. They appear to adapt themselves anywhere, and to live on any

food; pigeons, their eggs, the squabs in the nests, might now be among those things the swift snipe included - known to nourish these little alien pests, who are in England what rabbits are in Australia.

I have seen kestrel hawks in Greater London, hovering over the waste ground of the gravel pit by the Mazawattee tea factory in New Cross. And every year cuckoos return to the big cemetery at Brockley, flying among the tombstones which fill the fields that half a century ago were under the plough. During a rare space in the rumble of motor transport and drone of tramcars, their calls float faintly to the highroad like an echo of olden summer happiness stealing from that place now set apart for stones and silence.

III. NIGHT MUSIC OF BIRDS

Those restless and wild-piping birds, the waders, are sent wandering by frost to the estuary sand banks, and in the night a thousand cries come through the darkness. The curlews' notes are more distinct, sounding like a chain of gold bubbles rising in a pool vast and starry. As the tide carries its froth up the channels, the cries increase. There are gulls and plover with them, redshank, dunlin, little stint, and shelduck, and the night is a maze of sweet sounds. The curlew is a shy, nervous bird, and in winter he cannot bear to be separated from his fellows. Sometimes by day a flock goes inland, flying high over the ploughlands, with their tossing wake of gulls and rooks and starlings. They stalk in the marshy fields afar off, rising like many eyelashes, dull brown, and scattered at the sight of a man walking two fields away.

One frosty night, as I listened to the lap and gurgle of the sea racing past the gravel ridges, a faint clamor, like

staghounds laid on to the line of a deer far away, came down from the stars. The clamor changed to a trumpeting; the water shook in a net of stars. The night was filled with the rush of vast wings. Honk! honk! from stretched necks; a sudden uprising of frail cries from bank to bank, traveling far down into the distance; the harsh krark! of an uneasy heron. The wild geese were down from the north.

For an hour, as I stamped on the foreshore to keep warm, I heard other birds joining them: mallard, heard half a mile away by the quick whistle of wings from which pinion feathers were missing; green plover, soughing and calling forlornly, See-o-weet see-o-weet!

Listening to the slur and trickle and 'bubble-link' in the starlight, I wished I had the power to reproduce in music the variant night cries. Interwoven and continued, they glorified the night. Debussy could have caught and rendered them. Stravinsky could do it; no one knowing the natural life and hearing his original version of 'Nightingale' could doubt his power and his feeling. The same spirit is in Shelley's poetry. The composer of "The Immortal Hour' could change into music the flare and flicker of Sirius; the dry hiss of wind in the rimed shore grasses; the tiny glitter, as of black spiders' eyes, of the Pleiads; the blue lights of unseen ships lying off Bideford Bay; the luminous smear of starlit mist over the Pebble Ridge; the myriad cries of the birds; the hollow roar of the breakers on the bar. Not only the translation of actual sight and sound into music, but the purest feeling of man who in moments of freedom — of the earth unearthy — becomes one in spirit with the birds, sharing their joyous lives, and hopes arising in their hearts, to be loosed in wildest song when spring comes on the south wind and the earth grows green in the sunshine.

MR. TINK ROBINSON, the Scripture Reader, is a well-informed man. He knows Scripture and a good bit besides. I come to realize this as we sit together in the vestry of St. Botolph's, Aldgate, and I search the ink-corroded leaves of the ancient burial registers for stray facts concerning Humphrey Rowland, horn-breaker, who once gave bail for Christopher Marlowe. The Scripture Reader beguiles the dull intervals with strange fragments of London lore, while the livelier pages of the register show us some curious things. Here, for example, we run upon the burial (1582) of a certain Michael Johnson, 'a duch woman, called the great hulck.' A sobriquet amusing but not perhaps unnatural in a seafaring neighborhood; for Mr. Robinson reminds me that this parish went in those days right down to Wapping. One can picture the mourners towing that ponderous vessel of mortality in to the haven of St. Botolph's, to lay her up for good. . . . I turn more leaves.

What have we here? Burial of William Wooful, sometime assistant to a haberdasher 'in Gracious strete, who sufred at Waping for piracy on the High Seas.'

'Ah,' says Tink Robinson, 'it was down at Execution Dock where they hanged the pirates.' He was formerly of St. George's, Wapping, and is well up on the local history. 'I remember my old aunt telling me about the last pirate they hanged there. She was just

a girl at the time. Down Old Gravel Lane through the crowd came the cart, slow, and in it was the pirate: high hat, frock coat, and buttonhole bokay. But her mother would n't let her look out of the window. "Oh, Mother," says she, "here's a fine sight — maybe the only chance I shall have of a man to be hanged for a pirate, and you won't even let me look out on him!" But she heard it all from the others afterwards.' Mr. Robinson's aunt's mother evidently did not believe in the salutary effect on children of witnessing executions. She differed in this regard from the Sicilian mothers who, it is said, made a practice of taking all the young ones to such spectacles, and immediately thereafter administering a general thrashing-to make the children lay to heart what they had seen.

The ordinary or land criminal was of course gibbeted at Tyburn (which we now euphemistically call Marble Arch). It was only the pirate who suffered at Wapping. The Elizabethan Samuel Rowlands animadverts upon the latter place in graceful rime:

For though Pyrates exempted be
From fatall Tyburne's wither'd tree,
They have an Harbour to arrive
Call'd Wapping, where as ill they thrive
As those that ride up Holbourne Hill,
And at the Gallows make their Will.

Wapping's full name, as John Stow reminds us, is Wapping-in-the-Woze (Woze meaning 'ooze' or 'mud'); and

he describes it as 'the vsuall place of execution for hanging of Pirats & sea Rouers, at the low water marke, there to remaine, till three tides had ouerflowed them.'

One might readily presume from this that the unfortunate pirates were to be twice executed-once by the grip of the noose, and again by the rising of the tide; but the real reason for giving the high-seas robber a gallows to himself on the mud flats was that he was under the jurisdiction, not of the usual criminal courts, but of the Lord High Admiral. Crimes committed at sea and on the foreshore fell within the Admiral's cognizance, and sentence of death was therefore carried out also within the limits of his authority: that is, on the strip of land which lay below high-water mark. But what has become of Rowland the horn-breaker, whom I was hunting through the registers? Gone; driven out by pirates. John Stow, Saint Botolph, and Tink Robinson have comspired to abet the sea rovers, and my thoughts are now salty and romantic. Where shall I find the truth of the Elizabethan pirate and his exploits? Where but in the Rolls, or Record Office in Chancery Lane, that vast magazine of romance fresh from life?

To the Rolls! I take my leave of Saint and of Scripture Reader, and in the rushing channel of Aldgate High Street I board a Holborn bus. To run up the companion ladder to the swaying deck is to realize that only a seafaring nation could have developed this wind-swept, exhilarating, and precarious means of travel. The Londoner has reason to love his bus. 'Ennymaw fehz, plings? . . . Keogh!' These sounds mean that the purser, in the white cap of a ship's officer, wants tuppence. Satisfied, after a first attempt in which I nearly deposit the tuppence on the deck, he goes below, leaving me to reflection. Though there may not be

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a berth in the Navy, nor yet among the amphibious Marines, for every ablebodied Englishman, a conductor's lot is quite a happy one. Happy, but not without its dangers; for to-day's Observer whispers, as I open it, of a bust rolling so heavily in a stormy passage from Liverpool Street to London Bridge that the conductor went over the side. I feel obscurely that the body should be buried with naval honors. There might be a prayer 'for those in peril in the street.'

Yet the hazards of the buses — that great red fleet of broad, swift, and quiet barges are as nothing now to what they were in and after the thirties of the last century. To-day we live in jeopardy of life and limb, but in those days there was peril of pocketbook as well. For, though Shillibeer's Original Omnibuses rolled through London streets in politeness and efficiency, there were pirates abroad. Pirates, bearing the same inscription as the Shillibeers, preceded by the word not in very small letters. These overcharged passengers and met protests with abuse. New York's 15-5 taxi pirate is not an original villain.

To-day bus piracy is dead. The London conductor may be brisk, but he is neither brusque nor brutal. Boarding a bus one hot summer's day and clambering toward the cool impériale, a young woman of my acquaintance was met by an extruded head and a cockney cry of 'Full up on top; roight dahn inter the incubytor, Miss!'

II

Chancery Lane - and I am following its curving descent past the ancient gateway of Lincoln's Inn, beckoned on by the white Gothic towers of the archives of England. Pirates a plenty, I remind myself, are to be found in the records; but I not unnaturally want to

make the acquaintance of a sea thief par excellence. Yet I want no Francis Drake. He had his reward, in gold and honor. No Captain Kidd. He has had more than his share of notoriety for the small amount of actual piracy he had to boast of. My pirate must be not only a great one, but also one who has been more or less lost in undeserved neglect, and therefore somewhat fallen from his bad eminence.

With this resolution, I make for the list of criminal records of the High Court of Admiralty. Here they are, eighty-five volumes and bundles of trials for piracy and other crimes committed on the high seas. And here are the papers of Dr. Julius Cæsar, Queen Elizabeth's Admiralty judge. Most of Cæsar's papers are written in Latin; but an interesting sample from among those in English is the following itemized bill of the Sergeant of the Admiralty for executing five pirates:

In chardge for Thexecuting of John Agar, Gye Sadler, Willm Elliot, Robt Clarke, John Newton, the 22 of March 1583 [i.e. 1584] Imprimis for thexecuting of them, and cutting downe, being v after ijs a

else for an example, as the French put it, pour encourager les autres?

You notice that the ministers, officers, and warders were allowed to make quite a festal affair of this execution. They dined to the tune of eighteen shillings and fourpence, - albeit March 22, 1583/4 fell on a Sunday, and a Sunday in Lent at that, whereas the last supper of the five poor pirates cost the Queen only sixpence the lot. A very niggardly send-off for lads of Drake's calling. In fact, the more I read the more I am persuaded that good Queen Bess's glorious days were more specious than spacious, and that Bess herself was a right mean queen. Look again at that bill. She even borrowed the ladder from which they were turned off! But I may be doing her an injustice. Perhaps she is only emphasizing her queenly preference for larceny of the grandest kind. Those who rob the Spaniards on a large scale, you remember, she knights. But these little fellows, who meddle with small shipping nearer home, she callously turns off borrowed ladders, to wag hemp in the wind.

Doubtless a stimulating method in its effect, and one which made of the English good sailors and better pirates. Scaliger, a sage Italian observer, said, 'nulli melius piraticam exercent quam Angli'; and Edward Chamberlayne in his Anglia Notitia, remarks, 'Some of those who have more Wit than they can apply well, and a bold dexterity above all Europeans, are the most exquisite Pick-Pockets in the World and the most daring Thieves and Pirats.' Sea thieving became so popu lar that Elizabeth's successor, James, who loathed piracy on any scale, and desired to make a friend of Spain. struggled throughout his reign to stamp out what he termed 'this accursed plague introduced by Queen Elizabeth.' But he found it had so deeply