By oak and thorn Author:Alice Brown Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A STILL HUNT We would hear the nightingale, but, more slenderly equipped than John Burroughs in the same fine quest, we had not the certainty of making litera... more »ry capital out of our ill-success. For us failure was failure: a handful of the summer's gold irretrievably wasted. At Warwick, sure of place "and time agreeing," we made careful inquiry where the bird of wonder might be sought. According to the popular voice, the woods were full of nightingales ; I remember writing home, in a fit of emulous extravagance, that the tongues thereof daily served the castle lord and lordlings for breakfast. " Go down on the bridge, miss, at nine o'clock," said the optimistic landlady. " They do sing there most beautiful. ' Know one when you hear him ?' Yes, indeed, miss! You can't mistake a nightingale! " Like all who love their gloriously mediaeval and frankly dirty Warwick as she may be loved, we were accustomed to make a worshipful pilgrimage down past the castle at twilight, chiefly to steal dreams from one pink rose hanging high on the castle wall; and so it came about that our observance appropriately ended with the bridge and the greater quest. That rose held strange emphasis in those Warwick days; it played a part as real and wonderful as the role of princess in tales of fairydom. Little rosy breaths came from her petals, grew into clouds of fantasy and enveloped us. Our minds walked dimly in a morning haze. We imagined much about her, as one may about a rose. She suggested to us her who seemed to us then the Fairest of Women, and we made our lady Countess of Warwick (Cophetua's immortal maid !) hung there in her sweet deserving upon the antiquity of the house like that rose upon the stabile wall. And though I have been there since and the dirty white peacock flaunts himself with the s...« less