It had in it the rapture of a thousand
memories--memories of summer eves and snowy landscapes, of vanished faces
and forgotten scenes. It was at once stimulating and calming, and spoke
somehow the language of enduring and incommunicable things.
It is, I suppose, the associations of sounds rather than their actual
quality which make them pleasant or unpleasant. The twitter of sparrows is,
in itself, as prosaic a sound as there is in nature, but I never hear it on
waking without a feeling of inward peace. It seems to link me with some
incredibly remote and golden morning, and with a child in a cradle waking
for the first time to light and sound and consciousness.
And so with that engaging ruffian of the feathered world, the rook. It has
no more music in its voice than a tin kettle; but what jollier sound is
there on a late February morning than the splendid hubbub of a rookery when
the slovenly nests are being built in the naked and swaying branches of the
elms? Betsy Trotwood was angry with David Copperfield's father because he
called his house Blunderstone Rookery.
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