return to the spot on the second day and sit for an hour or longer,
listening, and still hear that same note constantly repeated until you
are sick and tired of it, or it may even get on your nerves. I remember
that on one occasion I avoided a certain thicket, one of my favourite
daily haunts for three whole days, not to hear that one everlasting
sound; then I returned and to my great relief the birds were all at
their old game of composing, and not one uttered--perhaps he didn't
dare--the too hackneyed phrase. I was sharply reminded one day by an
incident in the village of this old Patagonian experience, and of the
strange human-like weakness or passion for something new and arresting
in music or song, something "tuney" or "catchy."

It chanced that when I left London a new popular song had come out and
was "all the rage," a tune and words invented or first produced in the
music-halls by a woman named Lottie Collins, with a chorus to
it--_Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay_, repeated several times. First caught up in
the music-halls it spread to the streets, and in ever-widening circles
over all London, and over all the land. In London people were getting
tired of hearing it, but when I arrived at my village "in a hole," and
settled down among the Badgers, I heard it on every hand--in cottages,
in the streets, in the fields, men, women and children were singing,
whistling, and humming it, and in the evening at the inn roaring it out
with as much zest as if they had been singing _Rule Britannia._

This state of things lasted from May to the middle of June; then, one
very hot, still day, about three o'clock, I was sitting at my cottage
window when I caught the sound of a rumbling cart and a man singing. As
the noise grew louder my interest in the approaching man and cart was
excited to an extraordinary degree; never had I heard such a noise! And
no wonder, since the man was driving a heavy, springless farm cart in