I have just been to the house-door, to take a look at the winter’s night. A change is coming, the long frost nears its end—so the old ferryman has told me every morning for a fortnight back, and his perseverance as a prophet has been rewarded at last. As I flung the heavy oak door back, a breath of air struck upon my face warm, it seemed, as summer. All about me in the grey darkness there was an indescribable stir and awakening of life. The moon no longer stared down out of the black sky, a wicked, venomous-bright beauty on her full-fed, rather supercilious face: now she wore a scarf of mist upon her brows, and looked nun-like, dim-eyed, and mild. The stars had lost their cruel glitter. I stepped forth, and felt the grass yield beneath my tread—the first time for near a month past. And as I stood wondering and rejoicing at it all, some night-bird lanced by overhead, a note of the same relief and gladness unmistakable in its shrill, jangling cry.Hard weather in the country has a thousand enjoyments and interests for those who care to look for them; but when the frost holds relentlessly week after week, as it has done this January, the grimmer side of things comes obtrusively to the fore. There is too much shadow for the light. It is as though you rejoiced in the beauty of sunset beams on a wall, and it were the wall of a torture-house. You lie awake at night, and in the death-quiet stillness, hear the measured footfall of death—a dull, reiterated thud on the frozen ground beneath the holly-hedge, each sound denoting that yet another roosting thrush or starling has given up the unequal fight. Roaming through the lanes in your warm overcoat and thick-soled boots, you note the loveliness of the hoar-frost, at one step dazzling white, and at the next aglow with prismatic colour; and turning the corner, you come upon the gipsy’s tent, and realise that, while you lay snug and warm, nothing but that pitiful screen of old rent rags has stood between human beings and the terror of a winter’s night.

On one of the hardest days I met the old vicar of Windlecombe, and regaled him with the story of how I had just passed along the river-way as the tide was falling; how, at full flood, at the pause of the waters, the frost had sheathed the river with ice; and how, when the tide began to go down, this crystal stratum had remained aloft, held up by the myriad reed-stems; until at length, loosened by the sunbeams, it had fallen sheet by sheet to the wildest, most ravishing music, each icy tympanum, as it fell, ringing a different, dear, sweet note. And, in return for my word-picturing, the old man gave me a story of the same times to match it; how he had just learnt that certain ill-clad, ill-fed children—whom the law compelled to tramp every morning from Redesdown, a little farming hamlet miles away over the frozen hills, to the nearest school at Windlecombe, and tramp back again every night—were given a daily penny between the three of them for their midday meal; and how, as often as not, the bread they needed went unbought from the village store, because of the lure of the intervening sweetstuff shop. Later, in the red light of sundown, I met those children going home, as I had often met them, plodding one behind the other, heads down to the bitter blast. Each wore a great new woollen muffler, and had his pockets stuffed. I knew who had cared for them, and my heart smote me. Somehow the pure austerity of the evening—the radiant light ahead, the white grace of the hills about me, the star-gemmed azure above—no longer brought the old elation. The jingle of my skates, as they hung from my arm, took on a disagreeable sound of fetters. Though I carried them many a time after that, I never put them away without the honest wish that I should use them no more.

But lucidly, these long spells of unremitting frost are rare in our country. Ordinary give-and-take winter’s weather—the alternation of cold and warmth, gloom and sunshine, wind and calm—brings little hardship to any living thing. Country children have a wonderful way of thriving and being happy, even though their diet is mainly bread-and-dripping and separated milk. As for wild life, we need expend no commiseration on any creature that can burrow; and while there are berries in the hedgerows, and water in the brooks, no bird will come to harm.

It is curious to see how Nature ekes out her winter supplies, doling out rations, as it were, from day to day. If the whole berry harvest came to ripe maturity at the same season, or were of like attractiveness, it would be squandered and exhausted by the spendthrift, happy-go-lucky hordes of birds, long before the winter was through. But many things are designed to prevent this. Under the threat of starvation, all birds will eat berries; but a great proportion of them will do so only as a last resource. At first it is the hawthorn fruit that goes. The soft flesh of the may-berry will yield to the weakest bill, and the whole crop ripens together in early winter. But even here Nature provides against the risk of immediate waste, that will mean starvation hereafter. The missel-thrushes have been given a bad name because each of them takes possession of some well-loaded stretch of hedgerow, and spends the whole day in driving off other birds. Yet, on this habit of the greedy missel, depends not only his own future sustenance but that of all the rest. For all his agility, he cannot prevent each bird snatching at least enough to keep life going, and while he is so busy, he has himself no chance for gluttony.

Other berry supplies, such as the privet and holly, seem to be preserved to the last because they are universally distasteful, though nourishing at a pinch. But it is the hips, or rose-berries, which provide the best example of Nature’s way of conserving the lives of birds throughout hard weather against their own foolish, squandering instinct. These berries do not ripen all at once, whether late or early in the season. On every bush, the scarlet hips soften in regular, long-drawn-out succession, some being ready in early winter, and some not until well on in the new year. When the hip is ripe, the tenderest beak can get at its viscid fruit; but until it begins to soften, there is hardly a bird that can deal with it. The rose-berries, with their scanty but never-failing stores, are really the mainstay of all in hard times. It is doubtful, indeed, whether the birds that die wholesale in prolonged frosty weather, are killed by hunger at all. Probably their death is due rather to thirst. So long as the brooks run, bird life can hold against the bitterest times. But once silence has settled down over the country-side—the only real silence of the year, when all the streams are locked up at their source—then begins the steady footfall under the holly-hedge, and you must needs turn from the crimson sunset light upon the wall.

I have shut the heavy old house-door, and got back to my table by the workroom fire. The thaw has come in earnest now. I can hear the drip of the melting rime in the garden, far and near. The warm west wind is beginning to sigh down the chimney. The logs simmer and glow, but not with the greedy brightness of frost-bound nights.

It is on these long winter evenings that Solitude comes into her kingdom. Men are not all made alike, nor is solitude with all a voluntary condition, at least a self-imposed necessity, as it is with me—a something that I must fashion out of my own will and abnegation, weave about me as the tunnel-spider weaves her lair. In this ancient house the walls are thick, yet not so thick but that an ear-strain will just trip the echo of far-off laughter. If I but drew that curtain and set the door ajar, I could catch a murmur of voices like the sound of bee-hives in summer dark; and a dozen strides along the stone-flagged passage would yield me what I may not take for hours to come—tried and meet companionship, the flint-and-steel play of bandied jest, my own to hold, if I can, in brisk exchange of nerving, heartening thought. But these things in their season. Mine now it is to dip the grey goose-quill, to gird up for the long tramp over the foolscap-country before me—that trackless white desert where I must lay a trail to be followed, whether by many or few or none, or with what pleasure or weariness, I may never certainly know. For the writer is like a sower, that is ever sowing and passing on. He can seldom do more than take a hurried, fleeting shoulder-glimpse at the harvest behind him, nor see who reaps, if haply it be reaped at all.

Scratching away in the cosy fireside quiet of the old room, there comes to me at length a sound from the chimney-corner, to which I must needs listen, no matter what twist or quirk of syntax holds me in thrall. You often hear aged country folk complain that the crickets no longer sing on the hearth, as they used to do in their childhood. My own crickets have always seemed to sing blithely enough, too blithely at times to help one forward with a difficult task. But I had always been glad to accept the statement as one more proof of the decadence of modern times. Hobnobbing one winter’s evening, however, with the old ferryman in his riverside den, and noting how merrily the crickets were chirping in his chimney-corner, I wondered to hear him give way to this same lament. Then, for the first time, I realised that not the crickets, but his old ears, were at fault. Though the little smoke-blackened cabin rang with their music, the old man, who would, on the loudest night, have heard a ferry-call from the other side of the water instantly, failed now to grip the high-pitched sound. And this set me to philosophising. When the crickets cease to pipe in my own chimney-corner, then, and not till then, I will admit I am growing old.

But though we speak of the chirp or pipe of the cricket and grasshopper, it is well to remember that neither these, nor any other insects, possess a true voice. It would be nearer the fact to call the cricket a fiddler than a piper. For it is by sitting and drawing the corrugated rib of his wing-case to and fro over the sharp edge of the wing beneath, that his shrill note is developed. And it is only the male cricket who can chirp. The female carries upon her no trace of any fiddling contrivance. When all things were made, and made in couples, on the females of at least one numerous species, it is pleasant to remark, a significant and commendable silence was imposed.

Solitude by a fireside in an old country dwelling, the murmurous night without, and, within, the steady clear glow of candles made by your own hands out of wax from your own hives, it would be strange if the evening’s work failed to get itself done cleverly and betimes. Pleasant as it is to all penmen to be achieving, there is no depth of satisfaction like that of leaving off. Then, not to return incontinently to the sober, colour-fast world of fact, but to stay in your dream-country, idling awhile by the roadside, is one of the great compensations of this most exacting of lives.

Your tale is done. You have scrawled ‘The End’ at the bottom of the sheet, and thrown it with the others. You have turned your chair to the fire, put up your slippered feet on the andiron, and have filled your most comfortable pipe. The end it is, in very truth, for all who will read the tale; but for you there will never be an end, just as there never was a beginning to it. Unbidden now, and not to be gainsaid even if you had the mind, your dream-children live on in the town or country nook you made for them; live on, increase and multiply, finish their peck of dirt, add to the world’s store either of folly or sanctity, come to their graves at last, each by his own inexorable road, and each leaving the seed of another tale behind.

To the enviable reader, when, after much water-spilling and cracking of crowns, Jack has got his Jill, and the wedding-bells are lin-lan-loning behind the dropt curtain, there is the satisfaction of certainty that so much love, and one pair of hearts at least, are safe from further chance and change in the whirligig of life. But to the teller of the tale, there is no such assurance. Just as his dream-children came out of an immortality he did not devise, so will they persist through an eternity not of his controlling; and for ever they will be subject to the same odds of bliss or disaster as any stranger that may pass his door. Yet, being only human, he will nevertheless go on with his tales in the secret hope that Jove may be caught napping, and a little heaven be brought down to earth before its allotted time. For living in a world of law and order—where even Omnipotence may not deny to every cause its outcome—is too realistically like camping under fire. The old fatalists had peace of mind because they believed it availed nothing to crouch when the bullets screamed overhead, nor even to dodge a spent shot. But to take one’s stand in the face of the myriad cross-purposes and side-issues of an orderly universe, needs a vastly different temper. Perhaps it is just the secret longing in all hearts to have at least a little make-believe of certitude—if nowhere else but in the pages of a story—by which the art of fiction so hugely thrives.

I have put out the candles, each shining under its little red umbrella of paper, the better to see the joyous colour of the fire. When drab thoughts come—those night-birds of sombre feather—the pure untinctured glow from well-kindled logs has a wonderful way of setting them to flight. Let unassailable optimism make his fire of coals: for him of questioning, craving, often craven heart, there is no warmth like that from seasoned timber. Coals, with their dynamic energy, their superfluity of smoke, their sudden incongruous jets of flame, seem to be for ever insisting on facts you would fain forget a while, much as you may admire them and depend on them—the progress and competition of outer life. But wood fires serve to draw the mind away from modernism in all its phases. So that you burn the right kind of wood, and this is important, your fireside thoughts need never leave the realm of cheery retrospect. Good, seasoned logs of beech or ash are the best. Oak has no half moods; it must make either a furnace unapproachable, or smoulder away in dead, dull embers. Elm gives poor comfort, and the slightest damp appals it. Poplar is charity-fuel; burn it will, indeed, to good purpose, but too explosively. There is no rest by a fire of poplar: one must be for ever treading out or parrying the vagrant sparks.

A joyous colour it is—the wavering amber light that fills the old room now from the piled-up beechen logs; joyous, yet having a sedate, ruminative tinge about it, like old travellers’ tales of ancient times. Nor does the colour appeal only to the eye: there seems to be a fragrance in it. That this is no mere conceit but simple fact, I was strangely reminded when I blew the candles out, and from the smouldering wicks two long white ribbons of vapour were borne away on the draught. The fragrance of the smoking wax brought up a picture of the summer nights when the bees lay close to fashion it. Round about the cluster in the pent-up hive were thousands of little vats of brewing honey, each giving off a steam that was the life-spirit of clover-fields and blue borage, and sainfoin which spreads the hills with rose-red light. All these mingled scents had got into the nature of the wax, and now they were given off again in sweet-smelling vapour, such a fragrance as you may rarely chance upon in certain foreign churches, where the old ordinances yet prevail, and the candles are still made from the pure product of the hives.

And it is the same with burning logs. Each kind of wood has its own essential odour, which pervades the room as though it were soul and body with the light. You cannot separate the two; no riding down of fancy will dissociate the flickering gipsy-gold of the embers and the perfume of the simmering bark. If these do not fill your mind with memories of the green twilight of woodlands, of hours spent in leafy shadows of forest-glades, then—then you are not made for a country fireside, and were happier hobnobbing with Modernity by his sooty, coal-fed hearth.

II

It is not difficult to understand why indoor work is at most times tolerable in cities, fair weather or foul. For in cities earth and sky have long been driven out of their ancient comradeship. Stifled by pavements and masonry, the earth cannot feel the touch of the sunbeams, nor the air enrich itself with the breath of the soil. The old glad interchange is prevented at all points. There is no lure in the sunshine, no siren voice in the gale. Summer rain does not call you out into the open, to share the joy of it with the drinking grass and leaves. Amidst your dead, impenetrable bricks-and-mortar, you can plod on with your scribbling or figuring without a heart-stir; no vine-leaf will tap at your window, no lily-of-the-field taunt your industry, nor song of skylark dissipate your dreams.

But indoor work, carried on in a village deep in the green heart of some beautiful country-side, is on an entirely different plane. At times, perhaps, it becomes the hardest work in the world. With one lavish hand life gives you the things most necessary for close, unremitting application, and with the other she ruthlessly sets all manner of obstacles in your path. On such a day as now dawned crystal-clear over Windlecombe, with the first warm wind of the year blowing new life into everything, there was no stopping indoors for me. I got down to my work punctually enough, even a little before the wonted time. But good resolutions could make no headway against such odds. The south-west wind boomed merrily in the elm-tops. The sunbeams riddled my old house through and through. Out in the garden robins and thrushes had formed themselves into a grand orchestra; and when the breeze lulled for a moment, I could hear the larks singing far overhead, as though it were a summer’s day. An hour of half-hearted tinkering saw my fortitude break like a milldam. Five minutes later I had shut the house-door behind me, and was off up the village street, gulping down deep draughts of the sweet morning air.

I chose the path that led to the Downs. Mounting the steep, chalky track in the arms of the gale, with the misty green heights looming up before me against the blue of the winter’s morning, one fact was borne in upon me at every step. Though I must needs write winter—for January was but three parts done—it was no longer winter, but spring. A few days’ sunny warmth had worked what seemed like a miracle. In the hedges and trees the buds were swelling. Birds were pairing. Young green spears of grass showed underfoot. Across the path clouds of midges danced in the sunshine. I heard the first low love-croon of a wood-dove; and, when I stopped for breath in the lee of the hazel-copse, there drifted out upon me a song never yet heard on winter days—the mellow voice of a blackbird calling for a mate.

But the more we study Nature out of doors, the more we come to disbelieve in winter altogether. Winter is in truth a myth. From the moment the old year’s leaves are down, the earth is in vigorous preparation for the new year’s life and growth. Nature lies by quietly enough during the cold spells, but each awakening is a stronger and more joyous one. While they last, the long frosts seem to hold all the life of things suspended. Yet, with every return of the south-west wind, it is easy to see that this is not really so. Though the visible sunbeams have had no power for progress, those stored in the earth have been slowly and steadily at work. And when the thaw comes, Nature seems to take up the slack of the year in one tremendous forward pull.

I reached the crest of Windle Down, and made over the springy, dew-soaked grass, content to go wheresoever the tearing wind should drive me. The long, billowing curves of the hills stretched away on all sides until they lost themselves in distant violet haze. Here and there flocks of sheep made a grey patch in the sunlit solitude, and a low clamour of bells was in the air blent with the unending song of the larks. On the combe-sides the gorse spread its darker green, and, near at hand, I could make out its gold buds already bursting under the touch of the sunbeams The next hill before me was topped with a ring of fencing, near which stood a solitary figure, clear cut against the tender blue of the north.

Shepherding on the South Downs is an hereditary family calling, and old George Artlett, the shepherd at Windlecombe farm, had trained up two at least of his four sons to follow in his own tranquil steps. In village life, though the essence of neighbourliness is that it must be exercised impartially to one and all, worthy or unworthy, there are ever some about you with whom the daily traffic of genial word and deed comes more aptly than with the rest. In all the years I had known the Artletts, there had been scarce a day when I had not encountered one or other of that sturdy clan, and generally to my profit. If it was not the old shepherd himself placidly trailing along in the rear of his flock with his shining crook, it was ‘young’ George, the fifty-year-old under-shepherd, his pocket bulged out with a Bible; or Dewie, the shepherd’s boy; or John, the sporting handy-man, tramping off to covert with his pack of mongrels; or quaint ‘Mistus’ Artlett, carrying her household basket to and from the shop. Of Tom Artlett—the ‘Singing Ploughman,’ as he was called in the neighbouring market town—I got a glimpse sometimes in the early grey of morning, or more often of late afternoon, as he journeyed between home and farm. He ploughed his acre a day conscientiously, walking the usual twelve miles in the doing of it; and all the while his rich, powerful voice made the hills about him echo with the songs he loved.

Why he sang these songs, and why young George’s pocket always bulged, would have been at once evident to you if you could have looked out of window with me any Sunday morning about eight of the clock. Punctually at that hour, the two brothers strode by in their scarlet guernseys and blue, braided coats, on their way to the town; and there they passed a seventh day more toilsome than all the other six, coming home at nightfall hoarse and weary, yet plainly as happy as any men could be.

Young George Artlett stood on the hill-top, leaning upon his crook. The wind fluttered his coat about him, and lashed his haversack to and fro. He stood with his back in my direction, bare-headed, his grey hair streaming in the breeze. It was not until I had almost come up with him that I marked his uplifted face, his closed eyes, his moving lips; and then I stopped irresolutely, ashamed of the blunder I had committed. But before I could turn and retreat, the dog at his side had signalled my presence. The old tarpaulin sou’wester hat was returned to its place. Young George wheeled round, and looked at me with eyes of welcome.

‘I knowed by th’ bark o’ him, who ’twur,’ he said, in his slow, deep, quiet voice. ‘Rowster, ’a has a name fer all o’ ye. That there little happy shruck, ’tis yerself an’ nane other. When ’a perks up an’ bellers, ’tis th’ poodle-dorg an’ Miss Sweet. An’ when ’a grizzles, I an’t no call to look around; there be a black coat no gurt ways off, sure as big apples comes from little uns.’

He smiled to himself, as though the memory of some recent encounter with the black coat had returned to him. Then he took a quick glance at the sun.

‘Drinkin’-time!’ said he.

His sheep were all on the far hill-side, half a mile off perhaps, feeding—as sheep always do on windy days—with their heads to the breeze; and shouldering together in long, straight lines, roughly parallel—as, again, sheep generally will, in spite of the prettily ordered groups on painters’ canvases. It is only on days of perfect calm that grazing sheep will head to all points of the compass, and on the South Downs such days are rare indeed.

George Artlett put his hands to his mouth funnel-wise, and sent the shepherd’s folding-call ringing on the breeze.

‘Coo-oo-oo-o-up! Coo-oo-oo-o-up! Coom along—coo-oo-up!’

The shrill, wild notes pealed out, drawing an echo from every hill far and near. At once all the ewes on the distant sunny slope stopped their nibbling, and looked round. Again the cry rang forth. This time the foremost sheep moved a step or two in our direction, hesitated, then came slowly on. A moment later the whole flock was under way, pouring steadily up the hill-side and filling the air with a deep, clamorous song.

But two or three of the younger sheep had stayed behind in a little bay of grass beyond the furze-brake. Rowster looked inquiringly at his master, got a consenting wave of the arm, and was off with the speed of light. We watched him as he raced down the hill in a wide semicircle, and, taking the malingerers in the rear, drove them helter-skelter after the rest. Yelping and snapping behind them, he brought the whole flock up to the dew-pond at what seemed an entirely unnecessary pace.

‘’Tis allers so wi’ dorgs,’ observed young George reflectively. ‘Ye can never larn them as shepherd work ought to go slow as the sun i’ the sky. All fer hurry an’ bustle they be, from birth-time to buryin’—get the hour by, sez they, the day over, life done, an’ on wi’ the next thing!’

We turned our shoulders to the blustering wind, and leant over the rail together, watching the sheep drink. These dew-ponds on the Sussex Downs are always a mystery to strangers coming for the first time into the sheep country; and they are never quite bereft of their miraculous quality, even among the shepherds themselves. That in a land, where there are neither springs nor natural pools of water, man should dig hollows, not in the lowest sink-points of the valleys where one would reasonably make such a work, but on the summits of the highest hills, and then confidently expect Nature to fill them with water, keeping them so filled year after year, in and out of season, no matter what call was made on their resources—must appear little else than downright ineptitude to one who has never had the feasibility of the plan demonstrated under his very eyes. Yet the seeming wonder of the dew-pond has a very simple explanation. It is nothing more than a cold spot on the earth, which continually precipitates the moisture from the air passing over it; and this cold spot is formed on the hill-top because there it encounters air which has not been robbed of its vapour by previous contact with the earth.

The best dew-pan makers are the men of Wiltshire, as all flockmasters know. The pond, having been excavated to the right depth and shape, is lined first with puddled clay or chalk, then with a thick layer of dry straw; finally, upon this straw a further substantial coating of clay is laid, and well beaten down. Nothing is needed then but to bring a few cart-loads of water to start the pond, and to set a ring-fence about it to keep off heavy stock. The action of the straw, in its waterproof double-casing, is to intercept the heat-radiation of the earth at that particular point, so that the pond-cavity and its contents remain colder than the surrounding soil.

How the dew-pond came to be invented has often been the subject of wondering speculation. No doubt there have been dew-pond makers for untold centuries back, but at one time, however far distant, a first discovery of the principle underlying the thing must have been made. Probably the dew-pond, in some form or other, had its origin in those remote times when all the high-lying chalk-lands of southern England were overrun by a dense population. But then, as now, the region must have been waterless; and the people, living there for security’s sake, must, nevertheless, have been constrained to provide themselves with this first daily necessity of all life. We read of the manna given in the Wilderness, and the water struck from the Rock. These were miracles worked, as miracles ever are, for children: they were grown men, evidently, in mind and heart, to whom the dew-pond was given. For though the thing, in essence, was set to shine about their feet wherever men trod, so that none could forbear seeing, its adaptation to human need was left to man’s own labour and thoughtful ingenuity. To-day, as in those far-off ages, the dwarf plume-thistle studs the sward of the Downs, each circle of thick, fleshy leaves, matted together and centrally depressed, forming a perfect little dew-pond, that retains its garnered moisture long after all other vegetation has grown dry in the heat of the mounting sun. Even if there were no such thing as a dew-pond on all the Downs to-day, and every flock must perforce be driven miles, perhaps, down into the valley to be watered, it is inconceivable that no one of prime intelligence, wandering the hills alive to the need of the thirsty thousands around him, would mark the natural reservoirs of the thistles, reason out the principles they embodied, and straightway set brain and hand to work on the first dew-pond—using perchance, in earliest experiment, the actual thistle-leaves for the indispensable heat-retarding layer.

I had often talked the matter over with George Artlett, and now we drifted into the old subject. But he was never to be cajoled out of his belief in the miraculous nature of the affair.

‘Him as sent th’ fire down to th’ could altar,’ he said, his long arm going up to heaven, and his voice taking on that deep, vibratory chime so familiar to Sunday loiterers in Stavisham marketplace, ‘He knaws how to send watter to faith an’ a dry pan. Ay! but I ha’ seed it comin’, many’s the time. An’ th’ first time, I ’lowed as ’twur High Barn ricks burnin’. We was goin’ hoame to fold, and there afore me, right agen th’ red night-sky, I seed a gurt topplin’ cloud o’ summut as looked like smoke ahent th’ hill. Sez I, ’tis High Barn ricks afire! But it warn’t. It wur jest Gorramighty gatherin’ together His dew from the fower winds o’ heaven, an’ pourin’ it into Maast’ Coles’s pond.’

III

One afternoon, when the month was all but at its end, I came home through the riverside meadows. The sun had just dipped below the misty earth-line. Before me, in the east, the darkness was spreading up the sky, and the larger stars already shone with something of their nightly lustre. But behind me it was still day. From the horizon upward, and far overhead, the sky was a pale, luminous turquoise, overflecked with cloud of fiery amber—the two colours a perfect harmony of cold and heat. As I trod the narrow field-path, facing the dusk, with all that glorious enmity reconciled at my back, I became aware of a mysterious sound somewhere in the chain of tree-girt meadows on ahead. A missel-thrush had been singing hard by, but now his clarion had ceased, and this other far-away note forced me suddenly out of my musing. It was not a single song, but a deep, continuous outpouring, a medley of music like the splashing and tumbling of mountain brooks. With every step forward it grew in volume. At last, in a belt of elm-trees that bordered one of the farthest fields, I came upon the cause of it; and though I had many times seen vast congregations of starlings, I had never before encountered so huge a company as now met my gaze.The trees stretched across the entire field, and every twig on every branch had its perching songster, the combined effect being as though the trees had suddenly shot out a magic foliage, coal-black against the deepening blue of the sky, heavy and thick as leaves in June. Now the mountain brooks had swollen to Niagaras. The hubbub was literally deafening. I shouted my loudest, hoping to set the gargantuan host to flight, but I could scarce hear my own voice. For a full ten minutes I stood in that great flood-tide of melody, and all the time fresh detachments of birds were continually arriving to swell the multitude, and add their voices to the chorus. At length I saw two birds break away from the mass, and fly straight off side by side. Immediately the tumult ceased, and there followed a sound like the long, rumbling roll of thunder. The whole concourse had taken wing together, the tree-tops, released from their weight, lashing back as though struck by a flaw of wind. Now the army swept over my head, darkening the sky as it went. The thunderous sound grew less and less as the flock made for the distant woods. A moment more, and an uncanny silence had fallen on everything. Then, half a mile away in the misty dark, I heard the rich, wild voice peal out again, where the starling host had taken up their quarters for the night.Thus it happened every evening for a week after, when they passed on out of the district and I saw them no more. Probably no single stretch of country could support such incredible numbers for more than a few days together, and they must be for ever trekking onward, leaving behind them a famine-stricken land, and making life all the harder for our own native birds. For there is little doubt that these vast hordes of starlings that sweep the country-side in winter, are foreigners in the main.