his hook is DUE on the last date stamped below 
 

 
 BY LEAFY WAYS 
 
 gfubies from tfje Igoofe of 
 
 STATE NORMALSCHOOL, 
 
 I .OS 
 FRANCIS A. KNIGHT. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED BY E. T. COMPTON. 
 
 fourth (Eiiition. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, 
 1890.
 
 TO 
 
 J R. ROBINSON, ESQ., 
 
 THESE SKETCHES, 
 WHICH FIRST APPEARED IN THE DAILY NEWS, 
 
 |Ue (Sratcfullg 
 
 BY 
 
 THE AUTHOR.
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 TENANTS OF A SEASON ..... J 
 
 A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD 8 
 
 THE PROMISE OF MAY - . . - - 1 
 
 A RIVER PATH - 
 BY LEAFY WAYS . 
 
 AS EVENING DARKENS 
 
 SABRINA FAIR 
 
 A RISING GENERATION - - - - 38 
 
 A COLD-BLOODED RACE - . - . - 45 
 
 BY QUIET WATERS - - . . 52 
 
 59 
 
 A PARADISE OF BIRDS - . . . -66 
 
 74 
 
 ALL AMONG THE BARLEY - - . . 82 
 
 THE MISTY MOORLAND - - . . - 89 
 
 FOOTPRINTS ON THE SANDS . . - - 97 
 
 THE PARTING GUESTS ..... 104 
 
 FLYING, FLYING SOUTH ..... 109
 
 Table of Contents. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE RETURN OF THE FIELDFARE - Il6 
 
 THE SUMMER OF ST. MARTIN - - 123 
 
 'A GREAT FREQUENTER OF THE CHURCH - - 130 
 
 SYLVAN MINSTRELS - '138 
 
 WINTER VISITORS - - - 144 
 
 ADAPTED PLUMAGE - 149 
 
 OUTLAWS - - 157 
 
 SOME BIRD MYTHS - - - 1 66 
 
 WHEN WOODS ARE BARE - - - - 1 74 
 
 THE BIRD'S-EYE VIEW - - 182 
 
 THE WINTRY SHORE - - 189
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 IN WESTON WOOD Frontispiece 
 
 WREN AND NF.ST - i 
 
 THE STARLING'S HAUNT - - -. 8 
 
 BRIDGE ON THE DART - - 34 
 
 PEREGRINES - - . - 38 
 
 THE STEEP HOLM - - - 44 
 
 ON THE BROADS - . . To face 52 
 
 WINSCOMBE CHURCH . 59 
 
 WROXETER . Toface 74 
 
 ON DARTMOOR - - - 89 
 
 GATHERING SWALLOWS - - - 104 
 
 BORGUND CHURCH, WITH FIELDFARE'S NEST - Il6 
 
 GLASTONBURY ABBEY - - - 130 
 
 THE HAUNT OF THE KINGFISHER - - 149 
 
 KESTREL'S NEST IN CALLOW CLIFFS - - - 157 
 
 THE WOODPECKER'S HOME - - 174 
 
 IN SAND BAY - . jg;
 
 Under the greenwood tree, 
 Who loves to lie with me, 
 And turn his merry note 
 Unto the bird's sweet throat, 
 Come hither, come hither, come hither. 
 
 As You Like It.
 
 TENANTS OF A SEASON. 
 
 It was the season when through all the land 
 The merle and mavis build.' 
 
 C LOWLY, in 
 
 the morning of the 
 year, the hard hand of winter relaxes f 
 from the sleeping land. The purple 
 buds are thick on every tree. In the 
 copses, the woodbine and the briar 
 are fretted with tufts of dainty foliage. The white 
 clusters of the sloe cling to bare black stems like the 
 last trace of lingering winter. 
 
 Although there is but scanty cover yet in wood and 
 hedgerow, the birds even now, in quiet nooks and un- 
 frequented corners, are beginning to build. 
 
 I
 
 2 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 Already the missel-thrush has put the finishing 
 touches to her great nest in the apple-tree, where, with- 
 out a leaf to hide it, it stands plain to all the world. 
 
 In banks and walls, robins have long been busy with 
 their early broods. 
 
 The magpie is lacing more sticks among the outworks 
 of his citadel. In many a budding elm the song-thrush 
 is singing to his mate on her nest in the thicket below. 
 
 The mellow whistle of the blackbird, the cheerful 
 cadence of the chaffinch, and now and then on bright 
 days the music of the lark, tempt us to forget the 
 lingering bitterness of the winter, and dream of May- 
 day flowers and summer sunshine. 
 
 Most dexterous architects are these children of the 
 air. The nests of some of them may seem by com- 
 parison rough and undecorated structures, built for use 
 and with little claim to beauty. The jackdaw blocks the 
 turret stairway with a pile of rubbish that looks like pre- 
 parations for a bonfire. The ringdove trusts her eggs 
 to a frail platform of sticks woven so carelessly that 
 their white forms are often clearly visible from below. 
 
 Some birds, whose lives are passed chiefly on the 
 ground, make no nest whatever, and their young can 
 run in some rare cases, even fly as soon as they 
 leave the shell. But the nests of others, though used 
 only for a single season, are marvellous works of art ; 
 and of all clever builders, the most dexterous is the 
 long-tailed tit. 
 
 In a quiet corner of the meadow, where the dubious
 
 Tenants of a Season. 3 
 
 path is seldom worn by foot of man, a thick briar-bush, 
 standing out from the hedge, leans over the little brook 
 that under its canopy of fresh green hart's-tongue 
 wanders by unseen. In the thorny tangle of the briar 
 a pair of these skilful weavers will set to work upon 
 their dwelling, and the fast opening leaves of April 
 will soon draw over it a green veil. 
 
 The structure is indeed a triumph of the builder's 
 art. Without, it is an oval ball of moss felted with 
 wool and hair, and thickly studded with scraps of gray 
 lichen fiom the stems of ancient trees. Within, it is 
 cushioned so deeply that nearly three thousand feathers 
 have been counted in a single nest. All this is finished 
 in a fortnight, or less, from the first layer of moss to 
 the last feather in the lining. The entrance is at the 
 side a tiny hole, not always easy to discover. How 
 eight young birds find air to breathe in such close 
 quarters, and how their parents contrive to feed them 
 ail in their right turns, must ever remain a mystery. 
 And the wonder grows when we consider that twelve 
 or even twenty eggs have been found in one of these 
 diminutive nurseries. 
 
 The long-tailed tit has neither equal nor second, but 
 perhaps no bird approaches her more nearly ihan the 
 wrert. The materials she chooses vary with her sur- 
 roundings. Here, skilfully woven of green moss, the 
 nest fills a hollow in an old stump so naturally, that 
 among fringes of lichen, and dark festoons of ivy, it 
 seems but the growth of time. There, under the brown 
 
 I 2
 
 4 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 eaves of an ancient barn, it is a delicate fabric of dry 
 grass, harmonizing exactly with the stained and 
 weathered thatch. Now, in a chink in the crumbling 
 ruin, its grays and browns are in perfect keeping with 
 the tints of the time-worn masonry. Now, cradled in 
 the arms of the giant ivy, it seems but the handful of 
 dry leaves that the winds of autumn heaped into the 
 hollow. Many a time would it escape notice alto- 
 gether, did not the alarm notes of the builder, like a 
 miniature watchman's rattle, as she flits uneasily in and 
 out of the hedgerow, betray what she fain would hide. 
 
 Birds in general are jealous of any meddling with 
 their nests ; but the wren is particularly fastidious ; 
 and should her sanctuary be touched in her absence 
 she will detect the profanation in a moment, and will 
 probably abandon her eggs without further ceremony. 
 
 The wren lays eight eggs, and frequently rears a 
 second brood in the season. If all the young sur- 
 vived, there would be at the end of ten years no fewer 
 than two thousand millions of descendants to a single 
 pair. What ghastly tables of mortality the annals of 
 the race would furnish ! 
 
 The ivy-crowned ruin of the long dismantled mill 
 whose memory goes back to the days of the old Nor- 
 man survey is the haunt of many a shy feathered 
 builder. In their favourite nook, draped with dark 
 trailing moss, glittering with drops from water that 
 still plashes down where water fell a thousand years 
 ago, a pair of dainty wagtails make their nest year
 
 Tenants of a Season. 5 
 
 after year safe from all invasion, unless perchance the 
 visit of an unprincipled cuckoo. 
 
 Niches in the ancient walls are tenanted by the robin 
 and the oxeye ; among the sheltering ivy the chaffinch 
 weaves her nest. High up in the great sycamore that 
 spreads its broad arms over the ruin, a crow has built 
 himself a fortress destined ere long to be harried by 
 some angry farmer, and the thief himself, slain perhaps 
 red-handed, hung up as a warning to his fellows. 
 
 Along the wandering banks beyond, overshadowed 
 in summer by a cool canopy of marestail and meadow- 
 sweet, there lingers yet a relic, it may be, of far-off 
 feudal days. For among the tangle of the winter 
 thickets, peering shyly out here and there between the 
 glossy hazel stems, wild snowdrops, wild since Norman 
 times, hang their graceful heads far more lovely, the 
 naturalist fondly thinks, than their statelier sisters of 
 the garden. 
 
 Now the meeting streams widen out into the river. 
 Dark alders and gray willow-trees lean over the water. 
 Broad belts of sedge and rushes line the shore, set 
 here and there with fiery clusters of marsh-marigold. 
 
 Here in winter the snipe get up, with strange cry 
 and devious flight; and the water-rail steals silently 
 away under the bank, or, as she flies to cover, leaves a 
 silvery path with her trailing feet. 
 
 Here, too, in springtime, the shy moor-hen cautiously 
 anchors her broad nest of flags out in mid- stream 
 among brown stems of rustling reeds. Later on she
 
 6 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 will lead out her dusky brood on these tranquil waters. 
 Happy the man who catches sight of the little crew as 
 they make their first plunge into the world. A single 
 day old, perhaps, they do not hesitate at the approach 
 of danger to scramble over the edge of the nest and 
 swim boldly after their anxious mother to safer shelter 
 on the opposite shore. Little balls of black down, 
 with a touch of vermilion for a beak, they venture 
 fearlessly on their first cruise, diving under obstructing 
 logs or steering carefully through a fleet of lily leaves 
 with the coolness of a practised hand. Sometimes a 
 low-hanging branch will shipwreck unawares a little 
 argonaut and turn him on his back, kicking his long 
 yellow feet helplessly in the air until righted by a 
 dexterous touch from the parent's bill. 
 
 In a corner of the orchard yonder, as the spring 
 wears on, the redstart will settle down after her wan- 
 derings, and in the ancestral hollow in the moss- 
 grown tree will brood over her beautiful blue eggs, 
 while her handsome mate will sing to her from the 
 branch above, the briefest of lyrics indeed, but glowing 
 with the rich music of the south. 
 
 The swallow will come north across the far Sahara, 
 and find her way back to the old shed on whose 
 blackened rafters her nest has hung so long. The 
 white-throat and the chiffchaff, and many another 
 rover, will return and join the musical throng that 
 weave their fairy homes among the leaves. 
 
 Let no hasty hand disturb them, or too curious eye
 
 Tenants of a Season. 7 
 
 drive them from their accustomed haunts. It is strange 
 that any could be found to tear down the dainty fabric 
 and scatter its contents on the ground. But alas ! we 
 are all familiar with the birdsnester, who on mischief 
 bent strolls along the lane with a nest of gaping fledg- 
 lings in his hat and a string of birds' eggs in his hand. 
 He is a young barbarian, the aversion of the old ladies 
 of the parish. The parson has got his eye upon him. 
 He will come tc a bad end, after a career of depravity, 
 punctuated by ineffectual birchings, solitary confine- 
 ment, and the treadmill. 
 
 But there is happily a birdsnester of a different 
 stamp altogether, upon whose conscious ear there 
 never falls the accusing plaint of the robin, or the 
 lament of the plundered song-thrush. The flycatcher 
 builds fearlessly in his trellis ; the very oriole might 
 trust her eggs within his reach. No bird that flies 
 will find an enemy in him. He delights to watch and 
 not to plunder ; he finds his pleasure among the living 
 rather than the dead. The tenants of the tangled 
 coppice are yeomen of his manor ; he is proud to 
 reckon on his list of friends a score of singers 
 
 ' Whose household words are songs in many keys 
 Sweeter than instrument of man e'er caught ; 
 Whose habitations in the tree-tops even 
 Are half-way houses on the road to heaven.'
 
 A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD. 
 
 >.' ' T N those welcome intervals in 
 the bitter weather, when the 
 vanes have all veered round to the 
 southward ; when the biting east no 
 longer threatens to dry up the milk of human kindness 
 in the most genial soul ; when from a fair blue heaven 
 the warm sun smiles down upon the leafless land- 
 scape, the birds untaught by old experience and 
 bitter memories hail with delight the first glimmer of 
 returning spring. 
 
 The tender music of the robin and the noble 
 melody of the song-thrush give us in their dulcet strains 
 some foretaste of the ballad concerts of the April copses.
 
 A Citizen of the World. g 
 
 The rooks, wheeling round their windy stations in 
 the reeling elm trees, hold eager and excited conclave 
 on the havoc that storm and rain have wrought in the 
 ancient settlement. Ere long the dusky architects 
 will set to work in earnest. Ere long there will rise 
 above each long silent and deserted rookery, the 
 familiar Babel of the city in the air. 
 
 Jackdaws sit and sun themselves on the roofs, and 
 loiter round the gables in search of quarters for the 
 season. In noisy troops they drift along the gray 
 front of the old cathedral, debating, in their clear 
 incisive way, where they shall collect the bushel or so 
 of sticks for their respective nurseries with small 
 reverence for the stony lines of saints and sovereigns 
 whose battered effigies have outlived the storms of 
 centuries, and the leaden hail of iconoclast bullets. 
 
 But more striking still, visible everywhere, audible 
 on every side, proclaiming to all whom it may concern 
 that he is in want of a wife, there sings on every house- 
 top the light-hearted and irrepressible starling. He is 
 an odd-looking figure as he stands up there at the end 
 of the gable, or on the top of his favourite chimney 
 now crooning his own quaint runes ; now singing a 
 mellow stave copied from thrush or blackbird ; now 
 whistling like any plough-boy, with his head thrown 
 back, and shaking now and then his drooping wings, 
 looking for all the world like an old gentleman with 
 his hands under his coat-tails, laying down the law in 
 the family circle.
 
 io By Leafy Ways. 
 
 At first sight he may seem a dull and sombre bird 
 enough, of no special colouring, and slender claim to 
 beauty ; and the city starling, like most town birds, is 
 no doubt generally more or less tinged with the soot 
 of his usual surroundings. But at this season of the 
 year, wherever he may be perched upon the smoke- 
 blackened gable of a London roof or swaying on the 
 topmost spray of the noble elm that overshadows the 
 ancient homestead he is in his nuptial dress ; and 
 when the sunshine, flashing on his glossy plumage, 
 heightens the changing lustre of the exquisite gorget 
 of pointed green and purple plumes upon his silken 
 breast, lights up the brown lines in his wings, the 
 countless touches of white and amber scattered like 
 points of flame over his burnished feathers, it were safe 
 to say that few British birds wear a more brilliant 
 livery than the common starling. 
 
 He is a bird that everyone may watch who will. 
 He haunts the narrow grass-plot of the dingy city as 
 well as the broad meadow of the open country ; he 
 wanders by the windy sea, or on the upland pasture ; 
 he finds shelter in a niche of the cathedral turret, or 
 by the river in the whispering reeds. His home is 
 everywhere. He has well been styled a Citizen of 
 the World. 
 
 Starlings have not always been so widely dispersed. 
 There are parts of the country where old inhabitants 
 say that they were scarce half a century ago ; but of 
 late years they have spread very rapidly.
 
 A Citizen of the World. II 
 
 There are no more industrious birds among the 
 friends of the farmer. The rook plays a useful part, 
 but it is the part of second fiddle to the starling ; 
 though it must be admitted that the latter is a terrible 
 fellow when his energies are misdirected in a fruit 
 garden. 
 
 Like many birds, he is fond of berries. In the 
 mountain-ash trees especially, lighted here and there 
 with the hectic flush of dying summer, and hung with 
 clusters of scarlet berries, the birds in autumn hold 
 high revel. Missel-thrushes descend in hungry crowds 
 to the abundant harvest. Perhaps even a roving party 
 of ring-ouzels may pay a flying visit. But, while a 
 bunch of the bright fruit remains to plunder, the tree 
 will be alive from dawn to dark with the flutter and 
 the chattering of troops of eager starlings. 
 
 The song of the starling is not remarkable as a 
 musical performance, consisting as it does of a strange 
 inarticulate chatter, varied by whistling often not much 
 more melodious than the creaking of a gate. But 
 there is no bird more clever in imitating the songs of 
 more tuneful minstrels, or indeed any sounds, musical 
 or otherwise, that may strike his fancy. The town 
 starling brings back with him from his country rambles 
 into the hum of the city, the lapwing's wailing cry, the 
 pipe of the blackbird, the sharp clack of the jackdaw, 
 even the call of the curlew ; while his country cousin 
 on the barn roof will copy to the life the shrill cry of 
 the wryneck in the neighbouring elm, the crow of the
 
 12 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 cock in the yard beneath him, the chatter of a startled 
 magpie in the field, even imitate the whistle of a pass- 
 ing train ere it disappears in the tunnel. 
 
 The starling is a careless builder. His nest is no 
 marvel of patience and of art ; no exquisite fabric of 
 moss, touched here and there with lichen, and 
 harmonizing so well with its surroundings that it seems 
 part of the very branch in which it is cradled. It is 
 almost invariably placed in a hole of some kind, often 
 under the tiles of a house. Here, it is in the hollow of 
 an ancient tree; there, a few untidy ends of straw 
 hanging out of a niche betray its presence high up in 
 the ruined tower of the dismantled abbey. Now it 
 rouses the ire of the householder by stopping up the 
 rain-pipe ; now it is under the brown thatch of the old 
 farm gable. A favourite nesting place is a wood- 
 pecker's hole, new or old, and the starling is most 
 unscrupulous in evicting the rightful occupiers who 
 have had all the trouble of getting the house ready, 
 even before they have used it themselves. In some 
 such quarters, in a hollow in a little straw, are laid the 
 five or more delicate pale blue eggs ; and, when the 
 young are hatched, the cries of the old birds and the 
 clamour of their insatiable brood proclaim the where- 
 abouts of the nest to every passer-by. 
 
 In the Bavarian Highlands, where most birds are 
 scarce, and where the swallow builds unmolested in 
 the entrance hall of the village hostelry, the starling is 
 a welcome retainer. A starling-box, a little copy of a
 
 A Citizen of the World. 13 
 
 broad-caved mountain chalet, reared aloft upon a pole, 
 or nailed to a tree, or fastened to the wall of the 
 house, is a regular fixture of the garden. The birds 
 soon find out the quarters thus prepared for them, and 
 should a rash pair of sparrows presume to start house- 
 keeping in the apartment intended for their betters, 
 as not unfrequently happens, they will be summarily 
 expelled, and, as likely as not, their brood torn to 
 pieces and swallowed by the offended owners. 
 
 When summer is past, the scattered families of a 
 district collect in flocks, which, as the year advances, 
 swell to such dimensions that armies of starlings have 
 been seen which were estimated at millions. The 
 evolutions of these aerial legions have been the theme 
 of many writers, from Dante downwards. Now they 
 are marshalled in close array, compact and regular as 
 a Macedonian phalanx. Now the great mass melts 
 into a thin column, glittering in the sunshine as it 
 sways and bends like the shining coils of some huge 
 sea monster. Now, as by preconcerted sign, they 
 wheel with the roar of a myriad upturned wings. Now 
 they scatter like a shower of falling leaves upon the 
 meadow, where, with noisy chatter, and occasional 
 bickerings, they make as clean a sweep of slugs, and 
 flies, and beetles, as ever locusts made of the green 
 corn of Egypt. The uproar of such a host assembled 
 in a clump of trees before going to roost is a sound to 
 be remembered. It is a Babel of chattering, whistling, 
 scolding from a thousand throats at once. Now and
 
 14 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 then, a bird here and there whistles loud a few bars of 
 borrowed song. By degrees the sounds subside ; the 
 restless multitude gradually quietens down, and at last 
 is silent for the night. 
 
 In the Fen country starlings roost among the reeds, 
 and the damage they do to the sedges is of serious 
 consequence to the farmer. Such flocks must be 
 seen, or at least heard, before their size can be 
 appreciated. 
 
 A party of yachtsmen, mooring their craft late at 
 night among the Norfolk Broads, heard strange noises 
 on the shore, presumably of birds. A gun was fired, 
 and at once there rose out of the reeds a sound like 
 the rush of a train at full speed a roar as of a mighty 
 wave, coming in before an Atlantic gale. It grew 
 louder yet and stronger still, until it almost reached 
 the pitch of thunder. Another barrel, and another, 
 and another still, and each time there rose in answer 
 the same mighty sound; the whirr of innumerable 
 wings, the rush of winged legions rising from the 
 reeds, with the cries of startled wild fowl trumpet-like 
 through the deeper tone. An awsome thing to listen 
 to in the darkness : a weird and terrible sound. 
 
 Next day a flock of starlings was seen that might 
 well have played the chief part in such a chorus a 
 flock that stretched right across the sky overhead, as 
 far as the eye could reach on either side, until its 
 shadowy outline faded in the distance.
 
 THE PROMISE OF MAY. 
 
 V7EAR by year, in the spring-time, all through the 
 wild March weather, in the fickle days of April, 
 and under the genial smiles of May, there descend upon 
 our coasts, unseen, unheard, the legions of an invading 
 army. It is a host that no Government Intelligence 
 Department takes notice of ; which no system of coast 
 defences can keep out. They come upon us in the 
 dark or at best by moonlight : 
 
 ' The birds who make sweet music for us all 
 In our dark hours, as David did for Saul.' 
 
 Already the advanced guards have appeared, here 
 and there, in the southern districts. Already the 
 white flicker of the wheat-ear is conspicuous on the 
 bleak downs of Sussex, and the wide stretches of 
 Salisbury Plain. Already the light-hearted little chiff- 
 chaff utters his happy call-notes, in the reeling tops of 
 unsheltering trees. Already the tree-pipit, after soar- 
 ing high in air as if projected from a catapult, spreads 
 wide his wings and tail, and descends slowly, singing 
 as he sinks to his station on one of the weather-beaten 
 bushes of some still wintry hill-top.
 
 1 6 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 The swallows who have reached our shores have 
 not brought summer on their purple wings, and their 
 happy snatches of song seem out of keeping with the 
 chill air of our unfriendly spring. 
 
 It seems strange that birds which have known the 
 sun of Syria, or the clear skies of Algiers, should ever 
 come back to the fickle climate of these chillier re- 
 gions. One of them indeed does ' draw the line some- 
 where.' No nightingale ever yet set foot in the sister 
 island. A true Irish grievance, for which, alas ! Home 
 Rule will be found no remedy. 
 
 The phenomena of migration have always been an 
 object of wonder for a long time one of almost abso- 
 lute mystery. The older writers on natural history 
 describe how swallows pass the winter in holes, and 
 beneath the surface of ponds and rivers. One of them 
 even gravely propounded the theory that swallows in 
 the winter retire to the moon. It is but fair to add 
 that he abandoned it ' on the ground that the moon is 
 too far off to be reached by our migratory birds, and 
 because it is doubtful how they would find sustenance 
 by the way for so long a journey.' 
 
 This state of things is altered now. We know 
 where the migrants pass the winter ; and we know, 
 too, just when to expect the return of the wanderers to 
 their favourite haunts. They come at various intervals, 
 according to the species, but with a regularity that 
 hardly varies from year to year. 
 
 Swallows begin to come back in the first week of April.
 
 The Promise of May. 17 
 
 One of these early comers lately caught in the streets 
 of the Bavarian capital, numb with cold and spent 
 with travel, bore upon his slender foot a thin plate of 
 metal, stamped with the Imperial arms of Turkey. 
 Nothing more, not even a date, so that whether he had 
 come from Stamboul, or the beleaguered stronghold of 
 Emin Bey, remains unknown. But he had come in 
 advance of spring-time. Winter still brooded over the 
 Bavarian Highlands, and fresh-fallen snow lay deep in 
 the valley of the Isar as it often does long after the 
 arrival of the swallows. 
 
 A few days sometimes as much as a fortnight 
 after the swallow comes the cuckoo. There will be 
 the usual notices in country papers, of ' an extraordi- 
 narily early appearance of the cuckoo in March,' but 
 the naturalist knows better than to look for it then. 
 
 Perhaps there is no bird whose note is more 
 suggestive of the early days of summer than the 
 
 cuckoo ; 
 
 in April come he will ; 
 
 but 
 
 In May he sings all day. 
 
 The cuckoo of the poets is a wandering voice ; at best 
 but a dryad, who calls unseen from the depths of 
 the greenwood. There is certainly something strange 
 about a bird whose parents make no nest of their 
 own, and who has to depend on charity for his bring- 
 ing up. 
 
 But he is a very real figure in the sylvan landscape, 
 
 2
 
 1 8 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 and the naturalist knows well his barred breast and 
 delicate gray back, and knows, too, that he can say a 
 good deal besides his own name. 
 
 High up in the branches of some leafless elm he 
 sits, with drooping wings and tail spread wide, and 
 utters, with the clearness and persistent iteration that 
 we know so well, his welcome and familiar cry, bowing 
 each time with a precision which suggests his being 
 moved by machinery, like the quaint but faithful 
 effigies that proclaim the hours from gable windows 
 of Bavarian clocks. Now and then he makes a noise 
 for all the world like clearing his throat. Now with 
 loose flight he leaves his perch, uttering a musical trill 
 entirely unlike his usual monotonous song. 
 
 There seems no doubt that the cuckoo lays her 
 eggs on the ground, and carries them in her mouth to 
 the nest in which she means to leave them. Cuckoos 
 have indeed been shot in the act. 
 
 The experience of the birdnester suggests, and the 
 examination of a long series of specimens confirms 
 the idea, that the tint of a cuckoo's egg varies with that 
 of the intended foster-parent, and that it bears a 
 strong resemblance to the eggs of the wagtail, pipit, 
 whitethroat, or other bird in whose nest it is deposited. 
 How is this to be explained ? Does the cuckoo 
 which was reared by hedge-sparrows lay eggs of a 
 bluish cast, and does she choose in her turn hedge- 
 sparrows' nests to put them in ? Or do the eggs vary 
 indifferently, and does the bird carry each one in her
 
 The Promise of May. 19 
 
 mouth until she can match it to her satisfaction ? 
 Who can tell ? 
 
 April has brought the shrike back to the old corner 
 of the meadow, where last year she decorated the 
 thorns about her nest, with the bodies of unhappy 
 cockchafers and bumble-bees ; has brought the willow- 
 wren, and the whitethroat, and many another exile 
 home from the warm south. 
 
 May will bring the swift across the burning sands of 
 the Soudan, where bleach, alas ! the bones of many a 
 bold forgotten hero. The old fable of the Bird of 
 Paradise is true of him, for his feet never touch the 
 ground ; and, should any mischance bring him there, 
 those very pinions, that carry him through the air at a 
 pace that leaves him no rival in the world of birds, 
 from their length and their curvature, prevent his 
 rising on the wing. 
 
 Late in the month of May, the fly-catcher, among 
 the very last of the wayfarers, will find her way back 
 to the arms of the ancestral vine that wanders along 
 the sunny wall ; will perch once more on the low bough 
 of the same moss-covered apple-tree in the sunny 
 orchard ; will turn her bright eye up, down, round on 
 all sides, and then flash off to snap up a fly that has 
 ventured too near her station, as coolly as if she had 
 never crossed the sea at all, or basked in the sunshine 
 of a tropical sky. 
 
 In May the magnificent anthem of the nightingale 
 fills with melody the Surrey lanes. .
 
 20 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 In May the exquisite song of the blackcap half 
 tempts us to fancy that he, after all, is the chief of 
 singers. 
 
 It is in May that our wandering musicians delight 
 us with their sweetest lays. 
 
 But though the world is long in waking from its 
 winter sleep, there are signs that tell us spring is near. 
 
 ' The leaf-tongues of the forest, the flower-lips of the sod : 
 The happy birds that hymn their rapture in the ear of God,' 
 
 cheer our souls with the unmistakable promise of the 
 coming May. 
 
 The trees, indeed, are bare, and the leaves of most 
 of them will, for weeks to come, still remain fast sealed 
 within their purple buds. But the branches of the 
 elm, whose delicate twigs stand clear-cut in exquisite 
 tracery against the sky, are fretted with powdery blos- 
 soms. The swaying boughs of the larch are jewelled 
 with bright crimson tassels. The downy plumes of 
 the willow scatter gold upon the dusky moths that 
 crowd in the twilight about their honeyed fragrance. 
 The amber buds of the chestnut are unfurling into 
 soft green fans, though it will be long ere the broad- 
 armed trees, hung all over with their pyramids of 
 blossom, hum like mighty hives with the music of the 
 bees. The tall poplar is already touched with points 
 of gold, that shimmer in the sunlight until the whole 
 tree is like a trembling flame. 
 
 The copses are aglow with life and colour. Patches
 
 The Promise of May. 21 
 
 of wood-anemones are scattered like drifted snow- 
 under the bushes, with here and there among them 
 the brilliant colour of the early orchis. 
 
 The thickets have a tinge of vivid green ; and all 
 around there springs a forest of bright pointed leaves, 
 heralds of the bluebells that in May will gather in a 
 purple mist far and wide in the cool green shadows. 
 
 Daffodils have long been in their prime, and still 
 flame among the thickets, and wander out through the 
 straggling hedgerow into the pastures round the old 
 manor-house, 
 
 Till the broad meadows seem to blaze 
 Fields of the Cloth of Gold. 
 
 Primroses cluster thick along the banks, and all the 
 lanes are conscious of their soft perfume. Violets, 
 nestling in the cool rank herbage along the edge 
 of the copse, betray themselves by their fragrant 
 breath. 
 
 Even the cold heart of the city feels the generous 
 glow ; the sunny slopes of the Riviera are plundered 
 of cool white lilies, bright anemones, and sweet nar- 
 cissus, to light the grayness of the London streets. 
 
 But in accents plainer than the mute faces of the 
 flowers, the voices of the birds are full of the coming 
 of the spring. And everywhere, in all the country- 
 side, undismayed by sullen skies and bitter weather, 
 the light-hearted minstrels swell their merry throats 
 with music all the live-long day. The happy skylark,
 
 22 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 poised high on quivering wings, scatters over the fields 
 his floods of melody from earliest dawn, till 
 
 ' Pallid evening twines her beaming hair 
 In duskier braids around the languid eyes of day.' 
 
 The actual time that a skylark remains on the wing 
 is but brief. The bird usually descends after a flight 
 of from five to ten minutes rather less than more. 
 
 Quite different are the ways of the woodlark, whose 
 rich but broken warble is uttered from time to time as 
 he soars in wide circles, sometimes half a mile in 
 diameter, and he will stay in the air for more than half 
 an hour at a stretch. 
 
 The thrush and the blackbird two of our finest 
 musicians are now at their very best. 
 
 The robin's tender strain, the wren's brief lyric, the 
 roundelay of the chaffinch, the rhythmic song of the 
 yellow-hammer, with now and then the laugh of the 
 light-hearted woodpecker, each lends its own rare 
 colour to the chorus. 
 
 But still we are only on the threshold of the season. 
 We look away from bare brown branches, and from 
 wet April fields, whose red is just melting into green, 
 to the flowery month of May. In May, at least, the 
 sky is blue and fields are fair. Then these sober 
 meadows will be jewelled with golden cowslips. Then 
 the wild cherry will light with its pearly blossoms the 
 depths of the dusky coppice; the hedges will be 
 crowned with the splendour of the hawthorn. 
 
 Down in the lowlands the ditches will glow with
 
 The Promise of May. 23 
 
 blight marsh marigolds, and on the banks will gather 
 in a soft lavender cloud ' the faint sweet cuckoo- 
 flowers.' 
 
 Alas ! when May has come with all its bloom and 
 sweetness we shiver in the cool twilight, and sigh for 
 the sun of summer and the green canopies of June 
 We look in vain for the leafage of the elm, we miss 
 the perfume of the lime. We think that after all it 
 must be in June 
 
 ' When all the world is young, lad, 
 And all the trees are green.' 
 
 Ah ! it is the old story : 
 
 ' Life still ebbs away. 
 Man is ever weary, weary, 
 Waiting for the May. '
 
 A RIVER PATH. 
 
 T N the pleasant month of May the flyfisher begins, 
 by many a mountain stream, to ply his gentle craft. 
 The angler, reappearing as he does each spring like a 
 bird of passage, returns like the home-coming swallow 
 to the well-beloved, secluded haunt. 
 
 And now perchance, as, with rod in hand, he turns 
 his face once more towards the scene of many a 
 glorious day of toil and triumph, he pauses a moment 
 on the ancient bridge that spans the Dart, and leans over 
 the rude parapet for a first glance at the familiar river. 
 
 The time-worn arches of the bridge are draped with 
 ivy, and the crevices of the masonry are outlined with 
 tufts of tiny ferns. The massive piers against which 
 the waters fret with ceaseless murmur project up 
 stream like rams of fighting ships. For these battered 
 buttresses, about whose feet the silver ripples now are 
 playing with soft caressing touches, have felt the shock
 
 A River Path. 25 
 
 of many a willow trunk that, torn away from the bank 
 far up the stream, has been hurled against the stone- 
 work with all the fury of an angry river whose peat- 
 stained waters, swollen ten or even twenty feet above 
 their peaceful level, have left heaps of drifted rubbish, 
 high and dry among the alder-tops, to mark the tide- 
 line of the winter spates. 
 
 Just in sight, at the bend of the stream, is a chain of 
 deep pools, where lie some of the finest trout in the 
 river ; here and there among them no doubt a veteran 
 of stubborn fight, wearing still, as trophies of victory, 
 points of rusting hooks, and frayed ends of broken 
 collars. 
 
 The fisherman's eye kindles at the recollection ; his 
 grasp tightens on his quivering rod ; and, in spite of 
 old experience and fixed resolve, there will flit across 
 his fancy visions of the last struggles of that mighty 
 fish, whose end he has so often planned in vain. 
 
 There have been blank days in his past records 
 and blank days are still in store for him while trout 
 survive and rivers run days of biting east or coming 
 thunder, when he ransacked his fly-book to no purpose, 
 and changed his cast in vain ; when he was fain to lay 
 aside the useless rod, and stroll idly up the stream, 
 listening to the birds, or watching the trout playing in 
 the clear shallows. 
 
 But those idle hours by the river with its beauty 
 and its music, its life and its unfailing charm, may 
 rank among his brightest memories.
 
 26 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 How often, from the noble beech woods that rise 
 steeply from the shore, has he listened to the crow of 
 the pheasant, and the coo of the ringdove ! 
 
 How many a time has there sounded in his ears, 
 above the murmur of the river, the sudden cry of a 
 dipper, from his station on a boulder out in mid- 
 stream, his white breast standing clearly out against 
 the moss-covered stone, over its double in the water 
 below it ! 
 
 The dipper is a conspicuous figure on these moun- 
 tain streams. His dark coat, and snowy gorget, his 
 loud clear cry, his musical song, his straight and 
 rapid flight, are as familiar to the fisherman as the very 
 leap of a trout. His whole life is passed on the river. 
 In its waters he finds his food ; on its banks he makes 
 his home. 
 
 The dipper, like the wren, builds a domed nest, with 
 a scarcely visible entrance at the side, and vies with 
 that clever little architect in the cunning devices with 
 which it hides its habitation. 
 
 Here, in a hollow in the bank, skilfully concealed 
 among the roots of a pollard, it is faced with a few 
 dead leaves. Now, behind a cascade of water, it is a 
 pile of green moss, a foot or more in diameter, that 
 looks as if it had grown there quite naturally. 
 
 On a little grass within sometimes almost the only 
 dry part of tie fabric are laid the seven beautiful 
 white eggs. 
 
 Against the low cliff that skirts the creek over
 
 A River Path. 27 
 
 yonder, bounded by a tongue of land, dense with 
 willows and birches, a dipper makes its nest every 
 year, under an overhanging root of mountain fern, 
 whose scented fronds are now just beginning to 
 uncurl. 
 
 On the ground below plumed sedges cluster thick, 
 and tufts of cool green wood-sorrel nestle at the feet 
 of the willows. The creek is alive with darting trout. 
 A yellow wagtail is pacing daintily up and down the 
 shore. 
 
 Hark ! the cry of a dipper. There he goes, right 
 up to the nest ; but he is off again without pausing a 
 moment, and settling on a stone in the swiftest part of 
 the river, he begins to sing a loud, clear, yet soft, 
 and altogether delightful piece of music, with tender 
 passages and half-whispered love-notes in it, meant for 
 her ear alone who listens unseen from her moss-built 
 sanctuary. Now he breaks off with the loud alarm 
 note that the angler knows so well, and on rapid wing 
 sweeps round the bend of the river. 
 
 The merry and innocent bird is still in many places 
 ruthlessly shot, as a destroyer of fish-spawn ; but 
 repeated post-mortem examinations have proved be- 
 yond question that its food consists of small mollusca 
 and insects especially of the voracious larvae which 
 really are such deadly foes to the ova. 
 
 It is a clever diver, using both feet and wings under 
 water, like a penguin. It has even been asserted that 
 the dipper could walk on the bottom of a stream, as
 
 28 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 easily as on dry land, and the idea seems not yet 
 altogether abandoned. 
 
 Beyond the dipper's nest runs out a long spit of 
 sand, a favourite landing-place for the otter, whose 
 footmarks, with those of his brother angler, the heron, 
 are even now clearly printed on the yellow surface. 
 
 Here the path skirts a wide reach of the river, 
 bordered with royal fern just bursting into leaf, and 
 tall willow herbs, that give promise of a fringe of purple 
 along the green margin. 
 
 A solitary sandpiper starts up at the approach of 
 footsteps, and flickers down the shore, whistling his 
 three mournful musical notes. 
 
 A kingfisher darts across the shining level where 
 
 The swallows skim o'er the silver rim, 
 
 And dimple the magic glass, 
 From the deeps below rise breasts of snow, 
 
 To meet them as they pass ; 
 And .they flash and dip in the ruffled wave, 
 
 And a moment they float and quiver, 
 Through the widening rings, which their purple wings 
 
 Beat out of the crystal river. 
 
 As the angler strolls leisurely along the dubious 
 path that crosses the sunny clearings among the thick, 
 gray growth of young oak-trees, vipers, basking on 
 stony banks, glide rustling away into the thickets ; 
 startled rabbits hurry under the shelter of the luxuriant 
 rhododendrons, whose warm belt of colour skirts the 
 bird-haunted cliffs which here break the round swell 
 of the valley.
 
 A River Path. 29 
 
 From the steep slopes of the ravine comes the faint 
 roar of frequent waterfalls, rushing down unseen 
 through the still leafless wilderness of ash and oak 
 trees relieved here and there by the bright green of 
 feathery larches, or a group of sombre firs, harbour for 
 crow and kestrel. 
 
 In the summer-time, these headlong streams will be 
 breast high with noble royal ferns, lighted here and 
 there with the red torch of the foxglove, and, like all 
 the river-side, set thick with yellow broom. 
 
 The sides of the valley grow steeper yet and higher. 
 It must be full five hundred feet from the gray tor up 
 yonder to the broken glimmer of silver that roars 
 along at its feet. 
 
 High overhead a buzzard sails in wide circles. 
 Now, on his mighty wings, the noble bird drifts 
 leisurely up to the broad ledge where, safe beyond the 
 reach of all but the most daring of climbers, his eager 
 nestlings wait for his return. 
 
 Over the rocks about the nest are strewn the spoils 
 of the chase a ringdove or two, a hare, the remains 
 of half a dozen rabbits, perhaps even a blackcock. 
 For a buzzard that has young to provide for makes sad 
 havoc in his forays, though comparatively harmless at 
 other times, and contenting himself for the most 
 part with humbler quarry, after the manner of the 
 kestrel. 
 
 About the windy ramparts of this robber stronghold 
 stretch away the breezy uplands of the moor. Here
 
 30 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 and there rise the orderly masses of granite that 
 
 seem 
 
 ' Piled by the hands of giants 
 For god-like kings of old.' 
 
 Here, the brown expanse is seamed with the deep 
 workings of long forgotten miners ; there, are faintly 
 traced the hut circles of still earlier dwellers on the 
 heath. 
 
 Few figures now are seen on these broad solitudes, 
 beyond the wandering herds of ponies. But these 
 sad-coloured wastes that will flame with golden 
 asphodel, those leagues of dreary moorland that will 
 glow with the tender hues of the heather, are the 
 favourite covert cf the blackcock. Yonder bright- 
 green morass set round with sombre rushes is the 
 haunt of snipe and curlew. 
 
 At times the strange alarm of the ring-ouzel from his 
 perch on some stunted thorn-tree breaks the stillness. 
 A pipit flits restlessly among the furze. A solitary 
 raven wanders across the waste. Far up in the blue 
 sky sounds the faint carol of a soaring lark, just audible 
 above the sigh of the rustling sedges, and, save for 
 these, there lies over all the bare brown moorland 
 the silence of a desert.
 
 BY LEAFY WAYS. 
 
 r ~PHE fickleness of OUT English summer has ever 
 
 been a theme for satirist and cynic, and of all 
 
 seasons of the year June is perhaps the most inconstant. 
 
 But when she is in her right mind she is the Queen 
 of months ; if others keep a more even temper, no 
 other wears a face so fair. And although at times she 
 is coy and wayward she is always prompt to make 
 generous atonement by moods of added sweetness. 
 
 No other season can compare for a moment with 
 
 ' . . . . the grace, 
 
 The golden smile of June ; 
 With bloom and sun in eve r y place, 
 And all the world in tune.' 
 
 Untouched by the scythe of the mower shines the 
 golden glory of the meadows. 
 
 The lanes are white with hawthorn. Wild roses 
 blossom fresh each morning along the dusty hedgerow. 
 The woodland paths are lighted with clumps of fiery
 
 32 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 lychnis ; the gromwell adds a touch of imperial purple; 
 there is a broad flush of valerian among the stones of 
 the ancient camp, 
 
 Where the brake and the tufted gra^s are high 
 On the low mounds where warriors lie : 
 And, in the shade of cloisters dim, 
 Unconscious birds sweet requiems hymn 
 Over the nameless slain. 
 
 Peering out of tangled thickets, or clustering about 
 the feet of ancient trees, nestle patches of woodruff, 
 the fragrance of whose withered leaves, pressed 
 among the pages of some cherished book, calls back 
 memories of old delights, suggests new dreams of 
 love and sunshine. 
 
 And while woods and highways brighten thus under 
 the lavish brush of Nature, the clematis is twining its 
 white wreaths about our trellises ; our gardens are 
 magnificent with the rich clusters of the lilac and the 
 drooping gold of the laburnum, and the air of twilight 
 is heavy with their perfumed breath. 
 
 The woods have reached their prime. Broad-armed 
 beech, blossoming chestnut, and stately elm are draped 
 in their perfect foliage, their cool and varied tints 
 undimmed as yet to the monotonous tone of the later 
 summer. Noble oak trees, ever the monarchs of the 
 glade, bear up on their tall gray columns a swaying 
 roof of sunlit green. 
 
 We are apt to associate mistletoe with the oak ; but, 
 however it may have been in the days of the Druids,
 
 By Leafy Ways. 33 
 
 not twenty oaks are known in England on which it 
 grows in our time. 
 
 Mistletoe is particularly partial to the apple, but it 
 grows freely on the hawthorn, poplar, mountain ash, 
 and many other common trees. It is easily propagated 
 by crushing a berry into a crevice of the bark. 
 (The oak is very subject to the ravages of insects, 
 sometimes hardly a sound leaf can be found on the 
 whole tree. Among its enemies are various flies, 
 which, by making punctures in which to deposit their 
 eggs, produce oak-apples, and similar growths on the 
 twigs and leaves. One of the commonest, or at least 
 most familiar, is the ' nut ' or ' Spanish ' gall used in 
 making ink; but it is not native here, and has not 
 been long known in England. 
 
 The fly which causes the bright red ' currant ' galls, 
 so conspicuous in the early summer, furnishes an 
 instance of that strange phenomenon called alternation 
 of generation. These galls in their present state con- 
 tain grubs, which in time will turn into flies; but 
 these flies will not resemble their parents, and indeed 
 were long classed in a separate genus. The females 
 no males have yet been found deposit their eggs 
 on the underside of the leaves, giving rise to small flat 
 tufts called ' spangles.' The flies which emerge from 
 these spangles will be of the original type, and by 
 puncturing the tree will again produce ' currant ' 
 galls. } 
 
 By the time the foliage is at its best ; when, lit with 
 
 3
 
 34 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 flying gleams of sunlight and barred with soft blue 
 shadows, and balmy with the breath of trees and 
 flowers, the green vista of the woodlands is like a 
 vision of enchantment, we miss many of the songsters 
 who but a month ago seemed to have no thought but 
 to fill the glades with music. 
 
 (_ Most birds leave off singing, to a great extent, when 
 their days are filled with their family cares. And now, 
 on every hand, from banks and thickets, and from 
 holes in ancient trees, come the cries of hungry 
 broods. 
 
 Many infant aeronauts are ready for their first flight, 
 and after standing long on the edge of the nest, whose 
 circle has so far been the limit of their small experi- 
 ence, and watching with wide wondering eyes the 
 skilful evolutions of their anxious parents, the timid 
 children of the air spread doubtful wings to fly. 
 
 Some birds are singing yet. A still unmated black- 
 bird whistles loud his mellow musical notes. The 
 rippling song of the willow wren is as light and breezy 
 as if no thought of household cares could weigh 
 heavily on him, and as if the dainty nest down there 
 on the bank below him were no concern of his. The 
 blackcap, too, as he flits here and there in the cool 
 shadows of the underwood, still sings a few rich bars, 
 whose exquisite melody seems just in keeping with the 
 sylvan scene. Overhead, among the branches of the 
 beech, wood-warblers utter little gushes of song, and 
 the chiffchaff calls all day among the rocking tops.
 
 By Leafy Ways. 35 
 
 Now in the far recesses of the woodland sounds the 
 coo of a ringdove, where 
 
 1 In some nook of shadowed swaying greenness, 
 her 
 
 . . . calm voice deepeneth the holy hush.' 
 
 The cuckoo still is calling, but at longer intervals. 
 His utterance is less clear than it was ; he stammers 
 now and then, and his voice is apt to fail him at his 
 second syllable. We shall not hear him much longer. 
 He will soon be silent altogether, and some moonlight 
 night will vanish unseen. The young birds stay much 
 later than their parents, even as late as September. 
 
 In many a little woodland circle the appearance of 
 a young cuckoo, like an elfin changeling, has been 
 attended with dire results. For one of the earliest 
 concerns of the newly-hatched stranger is to make 
 room for himself by shouldering his foster-brothers 
 and sisters over the edge of the nest, to perish miser- 
 ably on the ground. He by this means absorbs the 
 undivided attention of his nurses, who, long after he 
 leaves the nest, full grown and strong of wing, will 
 follow and feed him ; and, with the assistance of their 
 equally infatuated friends and neighbours, will slave 
 from dawn to dark for their young monster, while 
 with gaping mouth and widespread wings he cries 
 unceasingly for food. 
 
 Satisfactory reasons for the parasitic habits of the 
 cuckoo seem yet to seek, although it is just a century 
 
 32
 
 36 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 since Jenner made known, as the results of careful 
 observations, his discovery that the young cuckoo did 
 actually turn out the other nestlings, and stated further 
 that a hollow in its back which disappeared when 
 the bird was a fortnight old, was evidently intended to 
 assist in this process of summary eviction. 
 
 The rambler in the greenwood may think himself 
 alone, but- there are many anxious observers of his 
 every movement ; keen eyes follow him as he strolls 
 unconsciously along. A woodpecker watches him 
 from behind a sheltering stem. A shrike leaves a half- 
 impaled cockchafer struggling on a thorn, and drops 
 silently into the depth of the hedgerow. A squirrel, 
 lying flat along a bough overhead, peers curiously down 
 through his leafy covert. A party of young weasels, 
 rolling over and over and purring like kittens at play, 
 pause in their frolic and crouch in the long grass, 
 watching sharply as his steps go by. 
 
 A troop of jays, making their first venture out into 
 the great green world, and crying querulously as 
 they leap lightly from tree to tree, catch sight of a 
 moving figure, and steal quietly away into more distant 
 cover. 
 
 By no means so noiseless are the manners of the 
 magpie. A note of alarm from -one -of -the old hands 
 is instantly answered from all directions by the sharp, 
 clear, and scurrilous responses of the whole excited 
 family. 
 
 There is never silence in the woodland.
 
 By Leafy Ways. 37 
 
 In the gray light of morning, long before the first 
 faint flush of dawn, the magnificent anthem of the 
 song-thrush sounds triumphant over all the voices of 
 awakening earth. The songs of birds, the hum of 
 myriad insects, the rustle of innumerable leaves fill 
 the air through the long summer days. 
 
 And when the sunlight has faded from the land- 
 scape, 
 
 . . . . when the brooding twilight 
 Unfolds her starry wings : 
 And worn hearts bless with tenderness 
 The peace that evetide brings ; 
 
 when the louder 'voices of day are hushed, the ear is 
 conscious of softer sounds the little, ceaseless stirs 
 among the leaves, footfalls perhaps of tiny night-roving 
 creatures; the drone of a night-jar like a ghostly 
 spinning-wheel in the dim shadows ; a stave or two 
 from some restless nightingale; snatches of a sedge- 
 warbler's song ; perhaps even the note of a cuckoo. . 
 
 The louder sounds of night are the shrill cries of 
 bats, that flutter like phantoms down the darkening 
 lanes ; the faint halloo of some wandering owl ; or the 
 croak of a heron, flying over unseen in the darkness.
 
 A RISING GENERATION. 
 
 '""THROUGH the long days of summer, under the 
 pleasant skies of May-time, and in the sunny 
 weeks of June, day by day fresh multitudes of birds 
 leave their nests, and enter upon the battle of life. 
 
 Woods and hedgerows are astir with troops of newly- 
 fledged birds, whose querulous cries and peculiar dress 
 are easily distinguished from the clear notes and 
 perfect plumage of their parents. 
 
 What a world of wonder meets the wide eyes of 
 these young children of the air ! 
 
 For some of them, alas ! what disenchantment is in 
 store, in the rains of November and the snows of 
 January. 
 
 There are birds who know their fatherland only in 
 
 y ' f
 
 A Rising Generation. 39 
 
 its summer dress ; who leave us ere earth puts off her 
 jewels one by one, before the last roses wither, and 
 while the woodbine still scents the country lane. Well 
 for those whose family traditions prompt them thus to 
 forsake our misty island for a brighter sky, and to stay 
 beyond the sea, until the sun once more stirs the 
 pulses of the slumbering land ! 
 
 The nests on which so much skill and labour were 
 expended are in use no longer. The green hammock 
 of moss, which far back in the month of May, the gold- 
 crest slung under a swaying branch of her favourite 
 fir-tree, is empty now. The eight small eggs smaller 
 even than those of some humming birds -have long 
 been hatched ; and the tumultuous crowd of fledglings, 
 who wear no mark of sovereignty yet, no touch of gold 
 upon their tiny heads, have left the nursery for ever. 
 
 Troops of tits, emerging from unsuspected chinks in 
 walls and trees, are playing all day long at follow the 
 leader in the woods and orchards. 
 
 The tits are clever builders, all of them, and few 
 birds choose such unlikely spots to build in. 
 
 The blue-tit makes his nest in a hole -often with an 
 entrance so narrow that it will barely admit the 
 finger. But sometimes the spout of a disused pump 
 will take his fancy, or an empty bottle hung in a tree 
 to drain. Now he hides his handful of moss and hair 
 in the pocket of the very scarecrow, whose outstretched 
 arms and fluttering vesture rouse no terror in his fear- 
 less soul.
 
 40 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 A pair of these bold little birds lately took posses- 
 sion of a West Country letter-box, and, regarding with 
 disgust the letters with which the postman persisted in 
 littering their habitation, they carried them off as fast 
 as they appeared, and dropped them over the neigh- 
 bouring hedge an irregular mode of delivery that 
 would have cost the old postman dear, had not a watch 
 been set and the real culprits discovered. 
 
 Young jackdaws, not yet masters of the art of flying, 
 flutter from point to point of the cliffs about their nest, 
 or perch in noisy companies on the pinnacles of the 
 old cathedral. 
 
 Even now the starlings are beginning to muster. 
 Down in the marshes there are troops a hundred 
 strong. In a few weeks, the dusky clans will have 
 gathered into those vast armies whose orderly array 
 and skilful evolutions are a feature of the autumn 
 landscape. 
 
 In a corner of the orchard, a party of young wood- 
 peckers, hardly yet able to fly, are climbing about 
 among the trees, digging into the soft wood, splitting off 
 pieces of loose bark, and bringing to light shining 
 chrysalids and juicy caterpillars lurking underneath. 
 
 In their younger days, their development is accom- 
 panied, as might be expected, by a rapid rise in the 
 temperature of their blood, which changes in a single 
 week from 97 deg. F. to 106 deg. F., when they are 
 sufficiently matured to climb out of the hole. 
 
 Swallows and martins, whose graceful flight and
 
 A Rising Generation, 41 
 
 gushes of musical song are so familiar earlier in the 
 summer, are busy with their first broods. These will 
 soon be ready to shift for themselves, and the parents 
 will then begin to think about a second family. 
 
 The swift, who is different in nearly all its ways, and 
 indeed is not a swallow at all, or even a near relative, 
 has but one set of eggs in the year only two or three 
 at that and these take up an unusual amount of 
 time. For, although hatched in June, the young will 
 be fed by the old birds almost until the whole family 
 are ready to leave the country. 
 
 The swift comes to us late from his winter retreat 
 in Africa, and, for a month or more, spends nearly all 
 his time in the air, now soaring high overhead, now 
 with half a score of dark companions careering round 
 his haunts with exultant screams, at a pace that 
 proves beyond dispute his empire of the air. The 
 swift never intentionally alights on the ground. Its 
 whole life, except during intervals of rest or when 
 hatching its eggs or feeding its young, is passed on the 
 wing. Not only is all its food taken thus, but the 
 very materials of its nest are caught up as the bird 
 skims along the ground. 
 
 It is not easy to estimate the speed of flight ; but it 
 has been said that a swallow can probably cover at 
 least seventy miles within the hour ; an eider duck 
 ninety; a peregrine falcon, in pursuit of prey, a 
 hundred and fifty. 
 
 But the powers of the swift are undoubtedly much
 
 42 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 greater. No bird can pass him on the airy highway. 
 His speed has been estimated at no less than two 
 hundred and forty miles an hour. A wonderful per- 
 formance, truly, for a bird whose weight although its 
 curved and narrow wings measure as much as eighteen 
 inches across from tip to tip does not quite reach an 
 ounce ! 
 
 Most of the birds that for half the year haunt the 
 sea-shore retire to a distance to breed ; some to upland 
 moors inland, some to Norway ; some travel even as 
 far as Siberia before they find a spot to suit them. 
 
 A few, however, remain, and the ringed plover, for 
 example, not unfrequently brings up her family on the 
 edge of her native beach. She makes no nest. In a 
 little hollow in the shingle above high-water mark are 
 arranged, with perfect symmetry, four rather sharply- 
 pointed eggs, which, tinged with pale buff and splashed 
 with brown and gray, match so well with their sur- 
 roundings that they easily escape the eye. 
 
 All along the shore rise in broken outlines the 
 picturesque sandhills, among whose rustling sedges the 
 evening primrose and great sea convolvulus bloom. 
 Clumps of sea-holly, yellow poppies, white patches of 
 campion and masses of golden stonecrop relieve with 
 their varied tints the monotonous piles of gray shingle, 
 strewn with dry sea-wrack, fragments of shells, broken 
 spars, and all the strange flotsam and jetsam of an 
 ocean beach. 
 
 A wide sweep of ribbed and yellow sand, palpitating
 
 A Rising Generation. 43 
 
 in the heat, stretches away to the heaving tide lazily 
 lapping the shining silver of the shore. In the distance, 
 dimly seen across the broad brown water, rise the faint 
 far outlines of the hills of Devon. 
 
 Suddenly a bird gets up with feeble flight, and utter- 
 ing a cry of distress. It is a ringed plover. She is 
 hurt : follow her a few paces. Her wing is broken ; she 
 will be easily caught. But still she contrives to keep 
 just out of reach, and fluttering a few yards now and 
 then, lures her pursuer on and on round the point ; 
 when, rising on swift, undamaged wings, and whistling 
 a cool clear note of triumph, she sweeps away far 
 inland, and makes a wide circuit back to where she 
 left her little family cowering among the pebbles. 
 
 In the steep side of the Holm that lies like a gray 
 cloud down on the horizon, a brood of young falcons 
 are even now looking down on the clamorous gulls 
 busy on the reefs below them. The rocky ledge is 
 strewn with fur and feathers relics of many a red- 
 handed foray. 
 
 The old birds range far and wide for their fierce 
 brood. The little farms on the mainland know them 
 well. Many a young pigeon goes over from their 
 dovecotes to the island, in the clutches of a peregrine. 
 
 It is an ancestral nesting place. From this niche in 
 the dark rock, stained with warm touches of lichen, 
 hung with clusters of golden samphire with here and 
 there a patch of blossoming thrift or a few tall spikes 
 of sea lavender, generations of these noble birds have
 
 44 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 looked out over the troubled sea ; have seen the sun 
 go down behind the far horizon, and watched the 
 flying colours fade out of the fiery sky as the world of 
 waters grew cold and dark under the veil of the 
 descending night. 
 
 Traditions of this ancient haunt go back to the high 
 days of falconry, when young eyasses taken here were 
 sent even into Scotland to be trained for the chase. 
 
 No spoiler now harries their lonely eyrie. He 
 must have been a bold climber who ventured down 
 that perilous overhanging steep, at whose base leap up 
 for ever the surges of the hungry sea. Here, safe in 
 their rocky fastness, year by year the fierce young 
 falcons spread their strong pinions, and plunge down 
 from the rocky threshold, with 
 
 ' The sudden scythe-like sweep of wings that dare 
 The headlong plunge through eddying gulfs of air.'
 
 A COLDBLOODED RACE. 
 
 T^HE lover of the country, knowing well by sight the 
 companions of his woodland walks, and remem- 
 bering that nowhere else is there so much life as in 
 English lanes and meadows, is still conscious that the 
 heath and the greenwood have many tenants whose 
 ways are wide apart from ours whose lives are passed, 
 as far as most of us are concerned, unseen and un- 
 known ; timid creatures that hear afar off the rustling 
 of footsteps and steal silently away into their secret 
 sanctuaries. 
 
 There are many night prowling animals which are 
 rarely observed at all. 
 
 A fox is seldom seen except when hard pressed by 
 the hounds. 
 
 A badger does not often see the light of day until, 
 scratching and struggling, he is dragged ignominiously 
 from his holt. 
 
 Not until dusk does the active little hedgehog 
 venture out to hold high revel under the friendly 
 shelter of the night.
 
 46 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 It is seldom that the shrew-mouse is seen, though 
 the rustling leaves often betray its devious course, and 
 its tiny voice is a familiar woodland sound. 
 
 Rarely does the mole come up from his under- 
 world into the glare of day, and shamble awkwardly 
 across the path that is too hard to burrow under. 
 
 The stoat and the weasel, conscious perhaps of a 
 black record, and fearful of retribution, hold them- 
 selves aloof, and we seldom do more than catch a 
 hasty glimpse of a brown coat, and long, slender body, 
 as one of the murderous race flees at our approach. 
 
 Even the owl is more often heard than seen, and it 
 is not often that we have the chance of examining the 
 quaint features of a bat. 
 
 But there is a whole tribe of wild creatures scattered 
 over the country, who, though not rare, are little known, 
 and who must be comparative strangers to society in 
 general. 
 
 Frogs and toads are familiar enough, and the latter 
 are encouraged by all gardeners who know their busi- 
 ness. Still, the toad is not a general favourite, in 
 spite of the lustre of his lovely eyes. 
 
 The beautiful newts that inhabit the horsepond are 
 still under the ban, and fearsome tales are current, in 
 country places, of the terrible efts that will bite a piece 
 out of your hand, and spit fire into the wound. 
 
 On the dry heaths there are active little lizards, clad 
 in mail, like miniature alligators, much smaller and 
 less brilliant than their handsome cousins who sun
 
 A Cold-blooded Race. 47 
 
 themselves on the walls of Pompeii, or bask on the 
 grassy slopes of Bavarian hay fields, but still graceful, 
 agile little creatures. 
 
 And there is the slow-worm a lizard without legs, 
 in his youth an especially charming object, with his 
 golden-brown coat and black dorsal line. 
 
 We hardly think of ranking the turtle among our 
 fauna, though now and then one of these burly 
 monsters has drifted by mistake into British waters. 
 One which came ashore in Dorset not long ago, 
 weighing nearly seven hundredweight, may have been 
 washed overboard from a vessel. 
 
 That the little water-tortoise of the south was once 
 an inhabitant of our fens, empty shells remain to 
 testify. 
 
 But snakes are our most important reptiles. 
 
 The occurrence of a ' new ' snake in Hampshire, 
 some years ago, attracted no little attention. It was 
 the Coronella Icevis, a common German species. It is 
 still met with occasionally along our southern coast. 
 The Rev. J. G. Wood considered it slightly venomous ; 
 but Buckland held the contrary view. 
 
 This snake, it may be observed in passing, is the 
 only species found in Malta ; and it is said, moreover, 
 to be the only snake that can hold on by its teeth a 
 very interesting fact when taken in connection with 
 Luke's account of the beast that hung on Paul's hand, 
 remembering, too, that the word ' venomous ' does 
 not occur in the Greek text, but was supplied by the
 
 48 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 translators. The natives would doubtless be no better 
 informed than our own rustics, who find poison-fangs 
 in every reptile. 
 
 But Coronella is a rarity, the ringed snake and 
 the adder are the snakes of the country. 
 
 The latter is not often two feet in length ; the former 
 seldom much exceeds three. Country people talk of 
 snakes five feet long, but the length of an uncaught 
 snake must be regarded in the same light as the weight 
 of a lost fish. A snake forty-five inches long is seldom 
 heard of. 
 
 The ringed snake is ever a lover of the sun, and you 
 will find him any bright afternoon in summer, basking 
 on his favourite south bank. Just over the hedge, 
 that skirts the old neglected orchard, is a fringe of 
 coppice that forms a safe retreat for him. 
 
 Among the tall cherry-trees the blackbird will sound 
 his mellow pipe as evening darkens, and when the 
 light of sunset has faded from that gray w y all of lime- 
 stone cliff; but just now the birds are silent; they 
 have crept out of the hot sun into the cool covert of 
 the leaves. 
 
 Tall Canterbury bells peer out of the hedgerow; 
 yellow St. John's wort, and pale blue scabious raise 
 their heads among the long grass. 
 
 Lying on the bank, half hidden in waves of bracken, 
 is an old stump scarred by insect-hunting woodpeckers, 
 and tenanted by a whole population of its own. In 
 front of it is a hollow where grass snakes love to lie.
 
 A Cold-blooded Race. 49 
 
 You must move with stealthy tread. At the first 
 sound the timid creature will be off, and you will 
 hardly have caught sight of the olive-brown coils before 
 the long and winding form has glided swiftly away 
 among the rustling bushes. 
 
 He has no weapons to rely on ; and if disturbed on 
 the bank of a river thinks nothing of taking to the 
 water, where his movements are even more graceful 
 than on land. 
 
 There he is ! Beginning to move already. Lay 
 your stick gently down on him and take him up in 
 your hand. 
 
 He is a beautiful creature. His bright eyes and 
 glittering tongue ; the to a naturalist, as, perhaps, to 
 the unhappy frog fascinating expression of his face ; 
 the cool skin not slimy, as some suppose, but quite 
 pleasant to the touch; the yellow collar round his 
 neck, and his varied markings, have a charm in them 
 that no one can realize unless he has suffered one of 
 these graceful reptiles to twine itself about his hands, 
 fondled the smooth armour of its glossy head, and 
 allowed the long black tongue to caress his finger. 
 
 The ringed snake has teeth that can draw blood if 
 he is very much provoked. He seldom uses them in 
 defence ; but woe betide the frog whose hind leg is 
 once caught in that fatal trap ! There is no escape 
 for him, and slowly, but surely, he will pass out of 
 sight, furnishing a sufficient meal perhaps for weeks. 
 
 The ringed snake, like all the race, is fond of the 
 
 4
 
 50 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 sun, but may often be found in a low-lying meadow, 
 where among the damp grass he may chase the light 
 and active frog upon his native heath. 
 
 But the adder haunts the dry hillside, the stony 
 hedgerow, the warmest corner of the coppice. 
 
 A favourite nook of his is in a heap of stones 
 gathered up long years ago by patient hands, in vain 
 attempts to reclaim the sterile pasture. All around is 
 the bare hillside, dotted with masses of briar or strag- 
 gling hawthorn, on whose swaying boughs the warm- 
 breasted linnets sing to each other in the late summer 
 afternoons. Here, patches of tall columbines cluster 
 on the edge of the slope. There, a group of slender 
 orchises mock the shape and markings of the bee. 
 The gromwell twines its wandering sprays about the 
 stones, and its rich purple blossoms still shine among 
 the dark foliage. 
 
 Yonder among the brambles is a cast snake skin, 
 good evidence that we are near the viper's haunt. It 
 is almost perfect, even to the coverings of the eyes ; 
 but it is inside out, just as its owner wriggled out of it 
 when his new mail coat was ready underneath. 
 
 There's our friend ! his broad body flattened out on 
 the warm ctones, and arranged in a wavy form that is 
 quite different from the attitude of the ringed snake. 
 Down the middle of his back is a very conspicuous 
 chain of black spots, forming a sort of zigzag line. 
 
 Adders are sometimes said to be deaf. Certainly 
 they often permit a very near approach without moving.
 
 A Cold-blooded Race. 51 
 
 Perhaps the consciousness of power makes them more 
 deliberate than the harmless snake, which has no 
 weapon beyond the power of emitting a not very 
 agreeable smell. The adder is much more irascible 
 too, and sometimes the first notice of its presence is 
 given by an angry hiss. 
 
 Hold him down with a stick. Now watch your 
 opportunity and take him up by the tail. There is no 
 danger whatever. A snake so held cannot raise its head 
 more than a few inches towards the hand that holds it. 
 
 On its head is a mark like a V ; the other way up 
 perhaps it might do for A ; though ' naddre ' is said to 
 be the original spelling, corrupted from ' a naddre ' to 
 ' an adder.' 
 
 He will strike if a stick is offered him, showing his 
 weapons two long teeth that are generally folded 
 away along the roof of the mouth. These make an 
 extremely fine puncture, hardly visible at the moment. 
 Presently a pain sets in like a bad wasp's sting, ac- 
 companied by a dull, throbbing ache, soon extending 
 up the arm, while the bitten hand swells and becomes 
 discoloured. 
 
 Oil applied to the spot, and ammonia taken inter- 
 nally, are the general remedies ; but the wound some- 
 times keeps open like a burn from phosphorus, and 
 heals up with difficulty. 
 
 The bite of an old adder in hot weather is no doubt 
 a painful affair, but only some half-dozen cases are on 
 record in which it has proved fatal to human beings. 
 
 42
 
 BY QUIET WATERS. 
 
 JUST as some mysterious impulse stirs the swift, 
 who has spent his brief summer in these northern 
 latitudes, to leave our shores in August, and journey 
 southward to the far Soudan, so at the same season 
 the old restless spirit impels the roving Englishman to 
 look out his maps, and his Murray or his Baedeker, 
 and join the outgoing stream of his wandering 
 countrymen. 
 
 To one man the beaten track, the comforts of 
 civilization, and the charms of society are indispensable 
 elements in the contemplated journey. 
 
 Another hastens to lose himself among new scenes 
 and unfamiliar manners ; he loves to get away from 
 the sound of English speech, and as far as possible 
 beyond the range of the telegraph and the post- 
 office. 
 
 To accomplish these ends men will cheerfully 
 undergo severe privations ; will face hunger and hard- 
 ship among Alpine snows ; will live for weeks upon
 
 By Quiet Waters. 53 
 
 milk zn&fladbrod ; and will endure without flinching 
 the torments of those clouds of mosquitoes of which 
 it is said that you may write your name in them and 
 read it quite plainly for five minutes afterwards. 
 
 But, without going so far afield to isolate one's self 
 from one's fellows, there may be found within the 
 bounds of our own island a little world of quiet and 
 seclusion, where life may be made as primitive as you 
 please ; where the railway, if not distant, is unseen ; 
 and where a postal delivery is a matter of uncertainty. 
 
 The Broads of Norfolk have become very popular of 
 late, and a whole fleet of craft of every style of build 
 and rig navigate now their devious waters. 
 
 But the yachtsman is alone in all the crowd. He 
 carries his sanctum with him, and when he is disguised 
 in what he regards as an appropriate costume a 
 compromise between the garb of a Normandy fisher- 
 man and an English bargee he looks with indifference, 
 not unmingled with contempt, on the tribes of his 
 fellow-creatures who, on similar pleasures bent, meet 
 him as he sails along. 
 
 There are various way of doing it. You may carry 
 your party of ten in the luxurious wherry with its 
 piano and the mirrors and satin-wood of its gilded 
 saloon. 
 
 You may cruise with half-a-dozen jovial comrades in 
 a roomy and well-appointed yacht. 
 
 But best of all is the little craft whose fittings are 
 suggestive of a doll's house ; where everything is
 
 54 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 packed away like a Chinese puzzle ; in whose cabin 
 it is impossible to stand upright ; on whose hard and 
 narrow bunks three kindred spirits may sleep the sleep 
 of the weary and dream of Tullamore a craft which 
 can go anywhere and do anything. 
 
 How refreshing is the cool air of morning, as you 
 crawl on deck when the east begins to brighten ! The 
 mist is still lying on the low lands on either side, and 
 all along the river rises the soft grey vapour. 
 
 Yonder stands a heron, still, silent, and watchful, 
 with an eye to fish for breakfast. Startled by the 
 sudden glimmer of a red cap, he raises his long neck 
 a moment, then draws it in, spreads his broad grey 
 wings, and leisurely drifts farther on round the bend 
 of the river. 
 
 A party of moorhens out in mid-stream take wing 
 and fly across to the shelter of the reeds, trailing 
 their feet behind them in lines of broken silver on the 
 glassy surface. 
 
 But now the galley-fire is lit. After a time a 
 pleasant fragrance of coffee begins to pervade the 
 yacht. 
 
 On the swing table in the little cabin are arranged 
 the mob of odd cups and plates that do duty for a 
 breakfast service. 
 
 And then the start is made. Perhaps there is a 
 good wind two reefs in the mainsail even, a steady 
 man at the tiller, and a ready hand on the mainsheet. 
 
 The next day may be calm. There is no breath
 
 By Quiet Waters. 55 
 
 even to float the lazy ensign. The sails flap idly this 
 way and that. The ship drifts gently with the stream. 
 You bask on the cabin roof with a book in your hand, 
 or, perhaps, a gun across your knee, and reflect that 
 time was made for slaves. 
 
 There is plenty of water-way for the yachtsman, 
 long stretches of river, whose course doubling on 
 itself makes steady sailing difficult at times, and 
 increases the monotony of the broad level lands 
 bristling with windmills like the coast of Holland. 
 
 There is more room on the Broads themselves. 
 Fair sheets of water some of them, with trim lawns, 
 and stately houses, and well-timbered parks. 
 
 Others less wide, encircled with noble trees, through 
 which show, here and there, the red roofs of peaceful 
 farms with fields of ripening corn stretching far away 
 on every hand. 
 
 Others again are shallow and weedy, with low and 
 treeless shores fringed everywhere with a dense forest 
 of reeds and bulrushes, the harbour of coot and moor- 
 hen, and the sanctuary for the brown water-rail who 
 loves to hide within its shadows. 
 
 For the lover of nature and of solitude there are 
 other lakes, less known and more difficult of access. 
 
 The narrow dyke half concealed by the tall rushes 
 will admit nothing larger than the dingy. Fleets of 
 white lilies, at anchor in the soft setting of their shining 
 leaves, rustle against the sides of the skiff. Long 
 festoons of weed cling fast about the oar blades ;
 
 56 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 perhaps a great mass of pond weed bars the way 
 altogether. Thickets have grown over the entrance ; 
 the very trees bend down into the water. 
 
 At length we are clear. Round the lake there rises 
 a green wall of foliage. The shore is dense with tall 
 reeds, in whose recesses rise the strange voices of 
 unseen water-fowl. 
 
 A brilliant kingfisher flashes off from his Ration on 
 an over-hanging bough ; a water-rail steals silently 
 away at our approach. A party of crested grebes 
 sailing in and out of the tall clumps of giant rushes 
 utter strange warbling cries. Sedge-warblers climb 
 about among the slender stems, or balance themselves 
 on the feathered plumes of the sedges. 
 
 Suddenly, with a chorus of musical notes, a little 
 company of birds alight close at hand among the tops 
 of the reeds. 
 
 The soft and brilliant tones of their exquisite colour- 
 ing, and their strange metallic call-notes as they swing 
 from their unsteady foothold on the swaying stems 
 show them to be no other than bearded tits, the most 
 characteristic birds of the district. 
 
 He is a happy man who is fortunate enough to 
 catch sight of these exquisite little creatures as with 
 graceful, dexterous attitudes they search eagerly for 
 food. 
 
 Driven from its haunts by the draining of the fens, 
 no longer a tenant of the Essex marshes, a rare 
 straggler up and down the country, the bearded tit is
 
 By Quiet Waters. 57 
 
 still an inhabitant of the Norfolk Broads. It grows 
 rarer every year, and no doubt in time will be remem- 
 bered by old inhabitants with the crane and the 
 bittern, the ruff, and the avoset, whom science and 
 labour have driven from their haunts among the 
 marshes. 
 
 But not alone for the naturalist and the sportsman 
 are there attractions among these lakes and rivers. 
 The eye of the artist dwells with delight on the 
 ancient boat-shed, with its rough and unhewn logs, 
 and its tiles weathered to every shade of red and 
 brown. 
 
 Within lies the battered skeleton of some nameless 
 craft. A little yacht in the creek close by is nearly 
 hidden by tall sedges, and flags, and forget-me-nots. 
 
 Behind is a group of ancient cottages about whose 
 gables vines cling lovingly as if with sheltering arms. 
 
 Beyond, on the shore, an old fisherman is at work 
 tarring his house-boat, which lies helpless on its side 
 like some strange sea monster stranded by the retreat- 
 ing tide ; while his boiling tar seethes and smokes as 
 he grimly stirs it, until he looks like a figure out of 
 some weird incantation scene, and one half expects to 
 see the column of smoke grow denser and take shape, 
 and become an Afreet terrible of face and speech. 
 
 Then as evening darkens you shorten sail and 
 prepare to make all snug for the night. 
 
 You make the yacht fast to the bank in the dark, 
 helped a little by the moonlight, in a lonely spot far
 
 58 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 away from sight or sound of man, unless it be a gaunt 
 windmill that rears its spectral arms against the sky. 
 
 The lamp is lit, the red curtains are drawn. 
 
 You go on deck for a last look before turning in. 
 It is a night of perfect quiet. The river is as smooth 
 as glass, and across the broad reflection of the moon 
 the coots and moorhens appear for a moment as they 
 paddle out from their covert in the reeds, now clear 
 cut in ebony upon the polished silver, now lost again 
 in the gloom. Now and then comes the croak of a 
 heron fishing on the bank, or the leap of a fish or the 
 splash of a water-rat. 
 
 Night in these solitudes is very still and silent. 
 There is rarely any sound to break one's slumber 
 louder than the ceaseless lapping of the ripples on the 
 side, the weird cries of wildfowl flying over unseen, 
 or the rush 01 some belated sail going past you 
 through the darkness like a ghost.
 
 AS EVENING DARKENS. 
 
 ''HERE are many birds which are 
 broad awake and busy from the first 
 gleam of daylight until night comes down. 
 The flycatcher is at her favourite post early and 
 late ; from dawn to dark the swallows fly ; the brilliant 
 dress of the kingfisher gleams through the twilight 
 like a touch of fire. 
 
 Others, like the woodpecker, retire before sundown. 
 But there are many creatures who stir abroad only 
 under the hush of night who leave their haunts and 
 come out into the world when the afterglow still
 
 60 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 lingers in the west, and mists are gathering along the 
 darkening hills. 
 
 In the gloaming the great book of nature opens on 
 another play, with altered scenery and different actors. 
 
 Now, on a quiet reach of the river, the otter sallies 
 forth with her cubs, from their fastness among the 
 willow roots under the bank ; and they gambol and 
 frolic in the water, and roll over and over like kittens 
 playing on the hearth. 
 
 There are few destructive creatures that have not a 
 useful part assigned to them in the economy of Nature ; 
 and even the otter, with all his appetite for trout, 
 renders excellent service to the angler by killing weak 
 and sickly fish, and thus helping to keep disease out 
 of the river. 
 
 Now all along the bank the water-rats come out 
 from their burrows, and sitting at the mouths of their 
 holes, or on the ledge that runs along the edge of the 
 stream, eat their frugal supper of reeds. 
 
 Now one drops into the water, and with nose just 
 visible above the surface, drifts noiselessly to the 
 farther shore. 
 
 Time was when the water-rat was regarded as a 
 dangerous beast ; a destroyer of fish, a plunderer of 
 nests, a foe to mallard and moorhen, with a record 
 nearly as dark as that of his cunning Hanoverian 
 namesake, of whom indeed he is no relative at all. 
 But he is a strict vegetarian, and no keeper need 
 watch with alarm his gentle and innocent ways.
 
 As Evening Darkens. 61 
 
 Here and there another much calumniated wood- 
 lander, the badger, has come out for his evening stroll. 
 In spite of his dull grey coat, the white streaks on his 
 head make him very conspicuous even in the dusk, 
 but he is shy of being watched, and is withal very fleet 
 of foot, and is not often seen in the open. 
 
 The bats that all day long have been hanging by 
 their claws head downwards, and folded up tight and 
 motionless within their leathery wings, emerge from 
 dark niches in church towers, or hollows of trees, or 
 the dim recesses of caves, and with noiseless flight 
 flutter up and down, uttering now and then that faint, 
 sharp cry which from its very shrillness many persons 
 are quite unable to hear. 
 
 Whole tribes of insects avoid the daylight, and 
 become active only in the dusk. 
 
 There are many moths which fly by day the 
 brilliant red cinnabar and the glossy burnet are fond 
 of the sun. 
 
 The humming-bird hawk-moth is another daylight 
 flier. Her attitudes are very suggestive of the bird 
 whose name she bears, and one is not altogether sur- 
 prised at her being sometimes mistaken for something 
 more highly organized than an insect. Now on rapidly 
 vibrating wings she poises herself before a flower, 
 while her long trunk, held straight before her like a 
 beak, is plunged into the honey-laden corolla. Now 
 with sudden movement she darts away almost too 
 swiftly for the eye to follow.
 
 62 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 Others of her race fly only by night. 
 
 The death's-head hawk-moth, with its marvellous 
 decoration of skull and cross-bones, is seldom seen 
 unless reared from the great chrysalis which will 
 be turned up in numbers among the late potatoes. 
 Cats sometimes bring this moth into the house, 
 attracted, perhaps, by the faint sound which the 
 creature makes. 
 
 Now the cricket and the grasshopper hold high revel. 
 
 Beetles of many kinds are abroad. Some of them 
 leave the water and roam over the country until the 
 glimmer in the east warns them to drop once more 
 into the cool depths. Another beetle, the glow-worm, 
 lights her lamp under the hedgerow to guide her mate 
 a plain, brown-coated little fellow who, though he 
 has an advantage over his wife in possessing wings, 
 has no power of giving light. 
 
 Now among the fallows sounds the shrill call of the 
 partridge. From the cool shadows of the elms along 
 the edge of the wood comes the pleasant murmur of 
 the ringdove. The curlews are out along the shore. 
 The dark forms of heron and wild duck drift across 
 the still glowing west. 
 
 The nightjar leaves the stony, bracken-sheltered 
 corner in her solitary orchard where she has lain close 
 the livelong day, and sails in and out among the trees 
 humming all the while her strange and droning cry. 
 
 In the long grass the corncrake, too, begins his 
 harsh and ceaseless call.
 
 As Evening Darkens. 63 
 
 His is no welcome serenade ; no discouragement 
 will daunt him, no power can stop him. 
 
 After having been kept awake half the night per- 
 haps by the monotonous chorus of these disturbers of 
 the peace, you sally forth in wrath, bent on avenging 
 your troubles in the blood of one of them at least. 
 You creep stealthily through the long, wet grass 
 towards the spot where a corncrake is calling ; the 
 sound suddenly changes its direction, and comes from 
 the right. You alter your course. Now it comes 
 from behind you. You turn angrily round, only to 
 hear it in the next field. Wet and miserable, you go 
 back to the house, while on all sides of you your 
 unseen enemies raise their voices in a malicious and 
 triumphant chant. 
 
 The song of the nightingale is the sweetest of all 
 the sounds of night. 
 
 He does not wait till nightfall. It is a faithful pic- 
 ture that the poet draws 
 
 ' A nightingale that all day long 
 Had cheered the village with his song.' 
 
 But he has long been silent now, and if his voice is 
 heard at all it is only as a harsh and angry cry at the 
 approach of some intruder on his solitude. 
 
 But of all night-wandering birds the most familiar 
 is the owl. Its large eyes with their wonderful 
 mechanism of bony rings for altering their focus are 
 specially adapted for seeing in the dusk. Its downy
 
 64 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 plumage, with the edges of the quill feathers softened 
 so as to look quite ragged, gives it the power of noise- 
 less flight as it skims over the meadows to pick up 
 mice and shrews for its quaint nestlings in their ancient 
 tree. 
 
 It seldom leaves fur for feather, but a bird is no 
 doubt taken now and then, probably when at roost. 
 
 The owl makes its home often in no very secluded 
 spot. We pass and repass the old elm that has shel- 
 tered generations of owls within its spacious hollow, 
 and seldom think perhaps of the staid and solemn 
 family that doze within. It is in a grassy lane, where 
 little heaps of grey ashes mark the site of many a gipsy 
 encampment. 
 
 These straggling hedgerows are a very paradise for 
 birds. Along these tangled banks, fringed with broad 
 green hartstongue, whitethroat and willow-wren weave 
 their fragile nests. 
 
 A moorhen drifting idly in and out of the reeds by 
 the shore of a little pond by the lane starts at our 
 approach. She quickens her pace, nodding her head 
 in time to the strokes of her feet, flirting her white tail 
 up and down as she swims. As we pass the stile she 
 takes wing and flies across the water and splashes 
 down into the thick growth of reeds that fringe the 
 margin. 
 
 A little farther on an old elm tree leans out of the 
 hedgerow. Behind its grey ivy stems the shy creeper 
 builds year by year her cosy nest. Within the gnarled
 
 As Evening Darkens. 65 
 
 and furrowed trunk is a great hollow worn by the wind 
 and the rain ot many winters, me fastness of the 
 owl. 
 
 Here, on dry fragments of rotten wood are laid each 
 spring the round white eggs. 
 
 Here, eacn evening the old birds come out and hunt 
 in the gloaming, and answer the calls of their friends 
 and neighbours from all the country round. 
 
 The screech of the barn-owl is a weird and awful 
 sound, like the scream of a murdered child. Coming 
 suddenly down out of the dark overhead, it is enough 
 to appal the stoutest heart. 
 
 But there is no terror in the musical call of the 
 brown owl, heard in the soft twilight as it floats down 
 from the coppice on the hill, from the tall elms on the 
 edge of the meadow, or in the dark shadows of the 
 sombre pines. In answer to some far-off call, there 
 comes at intervals his soft halloo, now from yonder 
 tree, now overhead a wandering voice, the phantom 
 cry of a bird unseen in the darkness.
 
 PARADISE OF BIRDS. 
 
 TT is late in the month of August. The hay harvest 
 of this half-hearted summer, long delayed and 
 sadly marred by rain, is over at length. The sun- 
 browned mowers who, with measured steps, kept time 
 knee-deep in the scented grass, swing their scythes no 
 more. The last waggon, piled high with its fragrant 
 load, rumbling on broad wheels down the narrow lane, 
 has been cheered into the stackyard. 
 
 The fields are bare. Where but a short month ago 
 was spread a living carpet, sweet scented, many hued, 
 stirred by murmuring bees and the bright wings of 
 roving butterflies, is now a smooth monotony of green. 
 
 It is the close of a pleasant chapter in the history 
 of the year. 
 
 And now upon the short sward the birds descend ; 
 not as of late, singly or in twos and threes, but in 
 troops whose numbers swell from day to day with 
 new recruits. 
 
 Some of these gathering flocks the clouds of
 
 A Paradise of Birds. 67 
 
 starlings, the flights of finches and yellow-hammers 
 are made up of the united families of the neighbour- 
 hood. The armies that gather by the shore -the 
 dunlins and the plovers come in from remote breed- 
 ing stations and distant moorlands. 
 
 There is not much music among the busy crowds. 
 A party of linnets, that alight among a patch of thistles, 
 twitter as they flit here and there, in sweet and tender 
 notes, and chatter in pleasant chorus as they rise all 
 at once into the air, but their breezy songs are ended 
 for the season. 
 
 Longfellow says of the plunderers of the fruit-garden 
 that the few cherries which they pilfer 
 
 ' are not so sweet 
 
 As are the songs these uninvited guests 
 Sing at their feasts with comfortable breasts ;' 
 
 but the truth is that the thieves say very little as they 
 clear the bushes, except to quarrel over the spoil; and, 
 save for the cheerful treble of the robin and the brief 
 lyric of the wren, there is little singing in the harvest 
 time. 
 
 Over the fields along the river sounds all day the 
 cry of the lapwing. 
 
 Here a handful of these handsome birds alight on 
 the fringe of sand which the fast falling water is leaving 
 round a little island in the stream. 
 
 Another troop spreads out like a party of skirmishers 
 over the meadow. 
 
 52
 
 68 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 Now one of the old birds, standing on a little higher 
 ground than the others, his long crest clearly defined 
 against the sky, catches sight of the boat that with 
 noiseless oars glides gently down the stream. Hardly 
 waiting long enough for us to see the bronze green of 
 his burnished wings he rises into the air with his 
 familiar cry not with the anxious solicitude of April, 
 when with every device of feigned lameness or 
 broken wing he sought to lure away the passing 
 shepherd from the eggs or young on the bare ground 
 near by ; but idly wheeling on his broad and 
 rustling wings over the next hedge to seek quiet 
 further on. 
 
 The young birds, not yet familiar with mankind, 
 and ignorant of the far-reaching powers of powder, 
 linger awhile, but at length they too take wing and 
 follow their elders broad dashes of black and white 
 against the bright August sky. 
 
 At the edge of the field, where the shore descends 
 steeply to the river, the bank is honeycombed with 
 sand-martins' nests. 
 
 It is a marvel how such soft billed and feeble birds 
 can cut their way even into this yielding material. 
 Having found, by experiment no doubt, which layer is 
 the easiest to work, they drive their tunnels to a depth 
 of from two to as much as six feet, or even more, 
 straight into the bank. Not seldom has the working 
 to be abandoned from the hardness of the soil ; but 
 when a suitable length is reached a slight nest is built
 
 A Paradise of Birds. 69 
 
 at the far end, where the patient miners rear in the 
 darkness their little family. 
 
 Their labours are over now. The old birds and 
 their broods are out all day together. Morning and 
 evening are spent on the river, where, skimming over 
 the surface among the eddying clouds of gnats them- 
 selves like gnats at a distance, each doubled by its 
 reflection in the water they dip their brown wings 
 now and then with a light splash that dies away in 
 widening rings of silver. 
 
 Sand martins always breed thus in communities ; 
 and house-martins too are fond of company, building 
 their nests by scores under the broad eaves of a house, 
 or about the arches of a river bridge. 
 
 The shore under the sand-martins' holes is fringed 
 with clumps of tansy, among whose bright golden 
 flowers flame tall spikes of loose-strife, with here and 
 there a patch of yarrow, or a tuft of broom. 
 
 On the edge of the water a couple of sand-pipers 
 are searching the rubbish stranded among the pebbles. 
 They rise on the wing as we approach, the broad 
 touch of white on their brown backs standing out 
 boldly on the dark water. Their plaintive whistle is 
 answered from the opposite shore, and two more put 
 off to meet them as they follow the windings of the 
 river. 
 
 The sand-piper is rather a solitary bird, and, like 
 others of its race, mostly silent, except thus as it flits 
 to a new hunting-ground.
 
 70 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 Birds in general prefer company, and, even if they 
 do not build in communities, will associate in small 
 parties, if not in flocks, when the breeding season is 
 over. 
 
 We are familiar with a few special names for these 
 companies. We talk of a covey of partridges, a pack 
 of grouse, a string of teal, or even a bevy of quails. 
 But we do not hear in these days of a walk of snipe, 
 an exaltation of larks, or a nye of pheasants. 
 
 Some are quite exclusive and keep pretty much to 
 their own family circle. 
 
 Other birds again and there are many such are 
 not sociable at all. Thus the robin, with all his 
 winning ways, will brook no rival in his little territory, 
 will allow no other bird to share his mistress's bounty, 
 and will drive away, not always without bloodshed, 
 any who venture on the forbidden ground. He is as 
 pugnacious as a gamecock, and, except in the spring, 
 is generally alone. 
 
 Herons, too, although they breed in company, and 
 pile their broad nests thickly among the trees of the 
 heronry, are seldom seen in numbers away from home; 
 and should a troop of them go down to the shore to 
 fish together, they are as silent as a party of friars, 
 and exchange no remarks at all beyond an occasional 
 croak as they fly leisurely homeward across the 
 moor. 
 
 The heron loves best the solitary stream that winds 
 its devious way through the meadows past the mill.
 
 A Paradise of Birds. 71 
 
 Ancient willows sentinel its banks ; dark alders bend 
 down over its waters. Along the shore the sedges 
 cluster thick. Here, is a tuft of pale willow herb ; 
 there, a belt of late-lingering forget-me nots. From 
 far up the stream comes the murmur of the mill. 
 Troops of cattle crowd to the shelter of the trees, or 
 stand knee-deep in the cool water. Here, in a quiet 
 nook, is the grey fisherman, waiting, silent and still, 
 for a trout or an eel to come within range of his 
 merciless bill. Here, on the sand, where the moorhen 
 and the water-rat have, left their light footprints, you 
 will find the broad track of the solitary heron. 
 
 There are many birds as unsociable as he. We see 
 for the most part one kingfisher on the brook, a single 
 crow in the warren. 
 
 Not the bird of the Laureate's stately verse, 
 
 ' The many- wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery home,' 
 
 but the lover of carrion, who has nothing in common 
 with his orderly kinsmen. 
 
 The crowy is an alien. He shuns even the society 
 of his kind. He and his mate, for, like many birds, 
 crows are thought to pair for life, build their great 
 nest high in the mighty elm no man can climb, in a 
 sequestered corner of the valley, or perhaps in the 
 heart of a gnarled and twisted thorn-tree on the fringe 
 of the moor. 
 
 No bird will trust its homestead under the shadow 
 of those sombre wings, unless perchance it be a stout-
 
 72 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 hearted misselthrush, who never hesitates to do battle 
 for his own, and who would show a bold front even to 
 the raven. 
 
 The voice of the crow harmonises with his character. 
 A harsh and sullen croak it is, uttered now and 
 then as he wings his solitary way homeward from 
 some deed of mischief in poultry-yard or rabbit- 
 warren. 
 
 The true lover of nature would plead even for the 
 crow, but the tenants of the rookery please him more, 
 and dear to his heart are its varied scenes and sounds. 
 He loves to hear the clamour of the sable builders in 
 the early days of spring ; to listen for the first queru- 
 lous cries of the young birds in their cradles in the 
 tree-tops ; to watch at dawn the sallying forth of the 
 legions far out over the country ; to hear their voices 
 in the sharp air of morning from the fresh brown 
 earth of the fallow on the hill ; to watch their dark 
 figures on the meadow where the withering turf betrays 
 the presence of unseen enemies beneath. 
 
 The farmer watches them well pleased. Even if 
 they have a way of paying themselves, and are not 
 always so particular as they might be to a grain or so, 
 they are his staunch retainers, and do him yeoman's 
 service. 
 
 Then, when the sun is down on the horizon, they 
 leave the meadow and go back to the elm trees under 
 the hill. How clearly, as they wing their way far up 
 on the brightening sky, their voices float downward
 
 A Paradise of Birds. 73 
 
 through the twilight air ! How sharply cut their drift- 
 ing figures 
 
 On broad wings steering home ; 
 As they seem to sink o'er the shadowy brink 
 
 Of the sea of fiery foam, 
 Where the sun has flung his golden shield 
 
 Over the margin grey ; 
 And the cloudy shore is flooded o'er 
 
 With a line of gleaming spray.
 
 SABRINA FAIR. 
 
 1 Sabrina fair, 
 
 Listen where thou art sitting 
 Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave ; 
 
 In twisted braids of lilies knitting 
 The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair ; 
 Listen for dear honour's sake, 
 Goddess of the silver lake, 
 Listen and save." 
 
 /~\N the upper reaches of the Severn the angler has 
 had but a sorry time of it in these unquiet days. 
 
 He looks sadly down upon a fluctuating river, whose 
 brown waters rise and fall with each change in the un- 
 certain weather. 
 
 It is the story of the season. In the drought early 
 in the year the stream fell far below its customary 
 level. Week after week it shrank still farther away 
 from its parched and crumbling shores. The narrow 
 islands were bordered with a fringe of sand. Stumps 
 of ancient trees, long submerged and black as ebony, 
 raised their dark heads above the surface. Patches of
 
 Sabrina Fair. 75 
 
 shingle, appearing in the shallows, grew broader still, 
 until, uniting with the shore, they formed headlands in 
 the falling stream. The cattle strayed across to 
 pastures on the opposite bank. No salmon could 
 get up the river; the fishing records dwindled into 
 nothing. 
 
 Then suddenly came the long spell of rain. The 
 white pebbles melted away into the rising stream. 
 The islands narrowed down and disappeared. Shiver- 
 ing aspens stood far out in the rushing river. Then 
 at last the fish came up. Then, in deep pools and 
 quiet reaches, a glimpse of silver and a mighty plunge 
 told that a noble salmon had leaped from the brown 
 flood into the air. 
 
 The rain ceased at length, and the stream went 
 down. The islands showed again their disconsolate 
 faces. Ere long the sodden grass grew green and fair, 
 with a tinge it were faint praise to liken to the emerald. 
 The grey willows shook the moisture from their mud- 
 stained leaves. The water rats watched the deluge 
 drain away from their thresholds, and, sitting each 
 under the shadow of his own patch of meadowsweet, 
 they munched their meal of reeds in calm content. 
 The hopes of the fisherman revived. 
 
 But, alas ! the river has not made up its mind. 
 There is a storm somewhere far away among the 
 mountains, and again the stream which never yet 
 has fallen to its summer level swells high and covers 
 up the reappearing way-marks.
 
 76 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 And in days like these, when the water 'which has 
 fallen a foot by the evening has risen two by the 
 morning, the rod is of little use. The salmon will look 
 at nothing you can offer them. The trout and the 
 grayling make no sign. 
 
 In days like these, when the creel hangs on the wall 
 and the rod stands idle in a corner, the angler turns 
 for solace to the river. 
 
 He takes his fate with calmness born of long 
 schooling in the gentle craft, nor bemoans with useless 
 plaint the fickleness of the weather. 
 
 There is always the river, with the charm of its 
 beauty and the magic of its song. The angler is like 
 the gentle scholar the poet sings of, who 
 
 1 wandered away and away 
 
 With Nature, the dear old nurse ; 
 And she sang to him night and day 
 The rhymes of the universe.' 
 
 Many a lyric has she sung to him in the solitudes of 
 mountain streams. Many a time has she soothed his 
 soul with the babble of the water, the voices of the 
 birds, the very breath of flowers. And so here, along 
 this stately river, he turns for solace and companion- 
 ship to the timid creatures whose bright eyes watch 
 him shyly from the shore ; he listens to the great voice 
 of the stream itself, here round some bold headland 
 rushing strong, there rustling softly in its fringe of 
 reeds. 
 
 It is at dawn that the river shows its fairest face.
 
 Sabrina Fair. 7? 
 
 The day opens with the soft haze so ominous of heat. 
 Mist is still rising from low-lying fields ; trailing cloud? 
 linger round the crest of the Wrekin. 
 
 From the rude landing-stage yonder a party of fisher- 
 men are putting off in their punts. If the rod is use- 
 less there are other ways of catching fish, and these 
 men in their clumsy boats may contrive to net a 
 salmon or two when the oldest hand would throw his 
 flies in vain. But it is hard work at the best of times, 
 and this year has hardly been worth the candle that 
 is to say, the licence, and the net, and the worries of 
 the water-bailiff. 
 
 The punts are worked against the stream until a 
 point is reached above the place where late last night 
 a salmon rose. The net is paid out. Each boat takes 
 an end, and the two then manoeuvre so as to sweep 
 the pool. 
 
 In order to frighten the fish from getting past the 
 ends of the net, stones are thrown into the water, and 
 a great splashing made with an instrument called a 
 ' splanger ' a pole with a disc of leather at the end. 
 The net is drawn slowly into a shallow. 
 
 It is often blank. Now and then a pike, or, better 
 still, a large trout is taken. Less frequently the 
 plunging corks betray to the eager eyes of the fisher- 
 men the presence of better game, and as the net comes 
 in a great gleam of silver proclaims that the king of 
 fish is entangled in the fatal meshes. 
 
 To-day there are two of them. The old man in
 
 78 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 command whose weather-beaten face seems in keep 
 ing with the battered timbers of his boat well pleased 
 with his morning's work, gets in his tackle. 
 
 The long poles are stowed in the punts, paddles 
 are got out, and the old craft drift easily down the 
 swift current and disappear round the bend of the 
 river. 
 
 Our way lies up the stream. It is six o'clock : a 
 glorious morning. Broad meadows glisten in the dew. 
 Long fields of grain are touched with the gold of 
 sunrise. 
 
 Suddenly three wild ducks get up, with a prodigious 
 splash, as we pass their quiet creek. 
 
 A swan, startled by the sound, spreads his broad 
 white pinions, and paddles along the surface with his 
 great black feet for fifty yards before he gets up way 
 enough to trust to his wings alone. 
 
 A couple of dab-chicks farther on look round, and 
 then dive out of sight, coming up a dozen yards nearer 
 shore. Then showing their brown heads a moment 
 only they dive again, and are seen no more, coming 
 up, no doubt, in the safe shelter of the willow- 
 beds. 
 
 A little company of goldfinches, which just now 
 were carelessly chattering to each other in their sweet 
 and breezy way, stop suddenly and begin to scold 
 violently. A blackbird rushes screaming out of a 
 thicket, where a wren takes up the cry and sounds an 
 alarm at the top of her little voice. A score of shrill
 
 Sabrina Fair. 79 
 
 little tongues join in the chorus, and excited little 
 figures leap from Chough to bough in hot pursuit of 
 some unseen enemy. 
 
 There he goes ! a stoat cantering along under the 
 bank. Entirely oblivious of the hue and cry over- 
 head, he pauses here to look into a rabbit-hole, there 
 to peer into a hollow tree. Now, quickening his pace, 
 he disappears, while the angry birds follow him still 
 with cries of warning and indignation. 
 
 Yonder is a man fishing from a coracle. It is a 
 strange coincidence that he has moored it just where 
 Watling Street passes the river by a long disused ford. 
 Under the picturesque little village, that clusters round 
 the square tower on the rising ground, lies buried an 
 old Roman town. Broad fields of barley ripen round 
 the ruins of the little forum. Fragments of sculptured 
 stone are built into the cottage walls. The very gates 
 of the churchyard are hung from pillars that adorned 
 a heathen temple. 
 
 For ever silent are the streets of that little colony. 
 Unknown to that dark-bearded fisherman the dress, 
 the speech, the manners of its lost inhabitants. But 
 the boat he uses is the boat they used. Its build, its 
 paddle, the manner of carrying it, have outlasted the 
 changes of twenty centuries. 
 
 By this time the sun is high in the heavens. It 
 deepens the warm red of the cliffs by the river, and 
 whitens the canvas of the little tent some rovers have 
 pitched by the shore.
 
 8o By Leafy Ways. 
 
 The birds that chattered to each other as the 
 morning broke are silent in the heat. 
 
 A kingfisher shoots like an arrow down the stream 
 from his perch on an old punt moored under a willow. 
 A few pigeons drop lazily into the ripening barley. A 
 greenfinch alone breaks the stillness with that drowsy 
 monotone so suggestive of indolence and sleep. 
 
 Not every peerless dawn is followed by a perfect 
 evening. As the sun sinks in the west great masses 
 of cloud that have long been gathering up from the 
 southward spread themselves rapidly over the sky. 
 
 A few scattered drops mar the silver of the water. 
 Then all the wide landscape is veiled by the grey robe 
 of the rain. The river darkens under the leaden sky, 
 while gusts of fierce wind ruffle it here and there with 
 sudden flaw. Dark and chill the evening closes in, 
 a lurid glare in the west showing where the sun went 
 down in the angry cloud-wrack. 
 
 Or it may be that the day of sunshine is crowned 
 by a peaceful twilight. 
 
 No breath of wind disturbs the silver stream. The 
 low banks with their fringe of grey willows ; the cattle 
 ruminating in the meadows ; the tall trees by the shore : 
 the few soft clouds that float across the clear wide 
 heaven, are reflected in the magic mirror so faithfully 
 that none can tell where the image ends and reality 
 begins. In the wake of the boat the water is broken 
 into alternate lines of silver and crimson. A belt of 
 fir trees stands cold and dark against the glowing sky.
 
 Sabrina Fair. 81 
 
 Turtle-doves, disturbed by the sound of oars from 
 their roost among the alders, flutter noisily from their 
 cover and vanish hastily on whistling wings. 
 
 Bats skimming over the surface like phantom 
 swallows, and dipping down now and then with light 
 touch even to the water, appear for a moment as they 
 pass the boat. 
 
 But now the light on shore looks down with welcome 
 gleam. The current will take us to our moorings. 
 
 ' Drops the light drip of the suspended oar 
 While chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more/
 
 ALL AMONG THE BARLEY. 
 
 1 Come out, 'tis now September ; 
 
 The Hunter's Moon's begun, 
 And, through the wheaten stubble, 
 
 Is heard the frequent gun. 
 All among the barley, 
 
 Who would not be bliihe ; 
 When the free and happy barley 
 
 Is smiling on the scythe ?' 
 
 are on the threshold of the Autumn. Plain 
 to read are the tokens of its coming. 
 
 Faint and shadowy lines they are which divide the 
 other seasons. Winter, ever parting with reluctance, 
 is apt to steal back in the night and leave his traces 
 even on the flowers. It were hard to say when Spring 
 has ended and the Summer set in. 
 
 But the story of Autumn is traced in bolder letters 
 and more certain tones its closing chapters even in 
 characters of fire. 
 
 The air grows sharper and the days draw in. Longer 
 still and heavier, lies the dew upon the glistening 
 fields. Grey mists, that after sundown brood over
 
 All among the Barley. 83 
 
 rich meadows like a fate, linger in the valleys like 
 phantoms, sullenly retiring in the dawn. 
 
 On the hills there is the first warm flush of heather 
 that ere long, mingling its purple with the gold of 
 blossomed furze, will spread over all the broad brown 
 slopes like the light of sunset. 
 
 The trees begin to brighten as under the touch of 
 Midas. The chestnut wears a tinge of gold. The 
 hedgerow is lighted with the fiery foliage of the maple. 
 The sombre tones of the woodland are broken with 
 the young leafage of the oak here pale yellow 
 changing into bronze, there tipped with points of 
 vivid scarlet. 
 
 Each gust of wind shakes down a shower of rustling 
 leaves, and in all the air there is an odour of decay. 
 
 There are broader dashes of colour in the fields of 
 corn, where, under the magic of the sunlight, green is 
 melting into gold. 
 
 Through the long wet summer days, while the 
 ruined hay lay rotting on the ground, while the farmer 
 was chafing at the dull weather and the frequent rain, 
 the corn grew tall and strong, until the well-filled ears 
 wanted nothing but a spell of sunshine. 
 
 But, alas ! the sky is leaden and the air is chill. 
 Ours is a fickle climate, at the best. We know it well. 
 The only disappointments it brings us are for the most 
 part when the weather turns out better than we had 
 hoped for. 
 
 We have long abandoned to the poets the praises 
 
 62
 
 84 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 of the Spring. We expect her to play us false. We 
 are only too well accustomed, after welcoming the 
 early primrose, to see the landscape whiten under a 
 fresh touch of winter. Yes 
 
 ' The Spring, she is a young maid 
 That does not know her mind.' 
 
 And Summer too, for all the charm of her early 
 dawns and pleasant twilights, her green draperies, and 
 her wealth of flowers : 
 
 1 And Summer is a tyrant 
 Of most unrighteous kind.' 
 
 But we look away from all this with the firm faith 
 that Autumn at least will be kind to us : 
 
 ' But Autumn is an old friend 
 That loves one all he can, 
 And that brings the happy barley 
 To glad the heart of man.' 
 
 Btrt now that Autumn is upon us he deals his gifts 
 with grudging hand. The days are marred with rain. 
 The half-reaped fields are waiting for the sun. 
 
 Now and then there comes, as if by way of conso- 
 lation, a perfect day, a day of Royal weather. Across 
 the fair blue overhead drift a few soft dreamy clouds. 
 A flood of warm sunshine fills the landscape. 
 
 Breast-high among the bearded grain stand groups 
 of stalwart reapers. On every side there rises the 
 whirr of the machine or the clink- of a whetted blade. 
 Along the hedgerows wait the feathered gleaners
 
 All among the Barley. 85 
 
 linnets and buntings in sober brown, finches and 
 yellow-hammers in green and gold. 
 
 Here, too, are the footprints of the Autumn. Here, 
 among the waving grain rises the graceful corn-cockle; 
 there, a patch of scarlet poppies shines like fire among 
 the wheat. 
 
 In the meadow beyond, the long grass is aflame 
 with autumn crocus a blaze of colour in the noon- 
 day heat ; in the twilight a soft, warm glow that clings 
 about the slopes and in the hollows like a purple 
 mist. 
 
 The field-gate opens into a lane, an old British 
 roadway from ancient lead-mines to the sea. 
 
 The camps, that guarded once the line of devious 
 road, look down from the hills out of waves of bracken, 
 now just tinged with brown, or through the orderly 
 ranks of feathery larches. A flint arrow-head, a frag- 
 ment of pottery, or a rusted weapon turned up here 
 or there, are all that remain of the bold defenders of 
 these ruined ramparts. 
 
 Centuries of wheel-tracks have worn down the 
 ancient way far below the level of the adjoining fields. 
 The elms that lean over it, through whose interlacing 
 boughs filters a dim green light, are centuries old. 
 Within their cavernous chambers, generations of owls 
 have lived and died. Troops of birds find shelter in 
 their friendly hollows. The straggling hedgerows, 
 unchecked by bill or pruning-hook, are draped with 
 trailing masses of bryony, or with pale festoons of
 
 86 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 bindweed whose great white flowers hang like lamps 
 among the graceful sprays. Brilliant butterflies flit 
 here and there among the brambles, and yonder skims 
 along on rustling wings that deadly foe of theirs the 
 dragon-fly, brave with burnished mail. 
 
 Among the thickets cling the torn and empty nests 
 from which long since the eager broods took wing. 
 Not all are yet abandoned ; there are still unfledged 
 nestlings clamouring for food. But the world is 
 peopled with the new generation ; young robins with 
 breasts spotted like thrushes, and betraying their real 
 parentage by their speech and attitudes alone ; gold- 
 finches, too, resembling their brilliant parents only in 
 the yellow of their wings ; 
 
 4 Linnet and meadow-lark and all the throng 
 That dwell in nests and have the gift of song.' 
 
 Under the bank among the broad fronds of harts- 
 tongue shine the bright berries of the arum. The 
 hazel boughs are heavy with rich brown clusters. 
 The dogwood and the wayfaring tree are beginning 
 to show their bold autumnal tints. The mountain- 
 ash is fully in its prime, hung all over with bright 
 scarlet bunches welcome feast to noisy missel-thrush 
 and wandering ouzel. 
 
 - There is an orchard hard by, a wilderness of 
 neglected trees, whose sour fruit just shows a tinge 
 of yellow. It is the very sanctuary of birds. Here 
 the jay hides her nest ; here the woodpecker finds, 
 year by year, the solitude he loves.
 
 All among the Barley. 87 
 
 From the old gate yonder we can watch unseen. 
 A bullfinch flashes out of the hedge as steps approach, 
 and flies a little way down the lane, uttering at intervals 
 his soft low notes. He is a handsome bird, with his 
 glossy black crown, his dark slate-coloured back, and 
 the exquisite flush of rose upon his breast. But for 
 mischief there are few to match him. A party of bull- 
 finches, united in a league of evil, will strip the buds 
 from your favourite cherry before you are down in the 
 morning ; not, as might be thought, because they are 
 attacked by insects ; not even stopping to eat them, 
 but scattering them in hundreds wantonly on the 
 ground. 
 
 From an old elm overhead sounds the flute-like 
 twitter of a nuthatch ; and next moment he appears 
 coming down the stem head foremost, hammering 
 now and then in likely places with a noise it seems 
 impossible so small a bird could make, in the hope of 
 turning up some juicy larva for his dinner. 
 
 Listen a moment to that faint note in the next tree, 
 like the feeble cry of a young bird. It is the creeper, 
 another climbing bird ; less dextrous indeed than his 
 neighbour, but with charming ways. Unlike the nut- 
 hatch, he cannot climb down the trunk, but, having 
 begun at the bottom and pursued his journey to the 
 topmost branches, pausing here and there on the way 
 to examine the crannies of the rugged bark with his 
 long curved bill, he flies off to the foot of another tree, 
 and begins again.
 
 88 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 Like the woodpecker, he is very clever at keeping 
 out of sight, and if alarmed will glide round to the far 
 side of the tree without apparently taking any notice 
 of the intruder, and until the danger is passed takes 
 good care to keep behind a branch in his upward 
 course. 
 
 On a low bough of an apple-tree near by, sits a fly- 
 catcher, motionless and forlorn. He is a stranger 
 here. He comes from farther north, and is on his 
 way to join his companions over the sea. 
 
 Short, indeed, is his stay in this country. The 
 flycatcher that built this summer in your trellis has 
 already departed, and his familiar perch on the garden 
 seat will know him no more until May comes round. 
 
 He was not the first to leave us. The dark figure 
 of the swift has long since vanished from the sky. 
 Even the swallows who remain are but a handful 
 compared with the great hosts, that, after lengthened 
 mustering and high debate, have started for the south.
 
 THE MISTY MOORLAND. 
 
 TT is the very heart of the moorland. On every 
 hand there stretch away to the horizon the hills 
 and hollows of the wide expanse. 
 
 The heather is in its glory. Over the slopes there 
 hangs a rich glow of colour, here brightened by the 
 vivid tones of the heather, there softened with the 
 fainter purple of the ling. Here a belt of gorse adds 
 a touch of gold ; there the ground is covered with the 
 sober green of the bilberry. Scattered over the peat 
 earth that shows darkly through the rents of the 
 imperial mantle, are patches of grey lichen, tipped 
 with scarlet.
 
 go By Leafy Ways. 
 
 But there is an overpowering sense of dreariness 
 among it all Greater than the wonder of its beauty 
 is the wonder of its solitude. Vainly the eye wanders 
 over the landscape searching for some signs of life ; 
 there is no man, no moving thing. The faint cry of 
 some restless bird serves but to emphasize the silence. 
 It is the stillness of the desert. 
 
 At far intervals the ground rises, gently at first, then 
 more abruptly, with here and there a block of granite 
 lifting its grey head above the heather. At last the 
 hill is crowned with a huge mass of seamed and 
 weathered stone that towers over the country like a 
 robber stronghold. Round its base soft mosses gather 
 thick. A multitude of plants have found footing on 
 its narrow ledges. Harebells hang their graceful 
 blooms among the rifted stone. Niches in the rocky 
 walls are the haunt of dove and jackdaw. Here on 
 the windy summit rests the wandering raven, and 
 with keen eye looks down on his wide hunting- 
 ground. 
 
 The heath near by is broken with long hollows, the 
 work of an ancient race of miners, of whom all other 
 trace has vanished. 
 
 Here, too, in the very heart of the wilderness, is a 
 haunt of birds. In the steep face of rock, that softened 
 by the touch of time bears now no mark of miner's 
 tool, the rockdove breeds. Quiet as our footsteps are 
 upon the springy turf, the faint sound disturbs the 
 timid tenants. Suddenly from the narrow cleft comes
 
 The Misty Moorland. 91 
 
 a rush of grey wings, and a rockdove flies hastily up 
 the hollow to the open moor. 
 
 The sound startles a ring-ouzel from his feast among 
 the berries of a rowan, whose roots seem anchored 
 in the living rock. His loud ' Tack, tack ' of alarm is 
 answered by a comrade, and the two wary birds fly off 
 and settle farther on, their white gorgets standing out 
 clearly against the dark heather. This is their native 
 heath. Under the tall plants that fringe the hollow 
 their nest was built except for its situation, like that 
 of the blackbird ; and. not even an expert can distin- 
 guish with certainty the eggs of the two species. 
 
 The outcry of the ouzels has disturbed a wheatear, 
 who with a flicker of his white tail alights on the top 
 of a heap of ore just visible among the bracken. 
 
 A sober-clad meadow pipit rises, too, with feeble 
 note. Her call is answered by a pair of stone-chats, 
 who, perched on the top of a furze bush, keep up for 
 some minutes an uneasy chorus of ' Chat, chat ' of 
 wonder at this invasion of their haunt. The stone- 
 chat is a smart little fellow, with his black head, his 
 neat white collar, and his ruddy breast. Few birds 
 are more clever in concealing their nests, and although 
 by no means rare, the eggs are not easily discovered. 
 The birds move away. The sounds grow fainter, and 
 then cease. Once more there is silence in the deserted 
 hollow. 
 
 These workings have long been abandoned. This 
 part of the moor is far from the regular mining
 
 92 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 districts. No clank of machinery breaks the stillness 
 of these solitudes ; no sounds of labour startle the 
 timid children of the heath. 
 
 On the high ground to the eastward stand the 
 tall chimney and grey walls of a modern engine- 
 house. But the dismantled buildings are empty and 
 deserted. The crumbling walls know no tenant but 
 the merlin, see no visitor but the rabbits of the 
 warren. 
 
 There are few paths across the waste. The rough 
 track to the mine is almost the only one an ordinary 
 eye would discover. 
 
 An ancient way over the moor marked by tall 
 granite crosses has been long disused. The crosses 
 remain ; the road itself is forgotten. 
 
 No man knows the district if he cannot find his way 
 without map or' compass. But in a Dartmoor mist 
 the oldest hand is helpless. With brief warning, close 
 and thick the grey veil comes down. Every landmark 
 is blotted out ; nothing is visible but a few yards of 
 ground. There is nothing for it but to sit down and 
 wait ; you cannot cross the Fox Tor Mire in mist. 
 The path is hard enough to follow in full daylight ; 
 now, a false step might mean destruction. Tradition 
 says that many a hapless wayfarer has perished in 
 that dismal hollow. 
 
 It is better now the mist is changing into rain. 
 The light grows clearer. From the shelter of that 
 great boulder you can watch the storm driving across
 
 The Misty Moorland. 93 
 
 the desolate moorland, hear the rush of wind among 
 the heather. 
 
 The bright green of the peat-moss, with that dark 
 fringe of rushes, marks the course of a hidden stream 
 one of the countless channels that vein the bosom 
 of the hills. Here in winter the snipe will lie in 
 scores. It is a place beloved of wild duck, too ; and 
 just now there may be a curlew lingering about the 
 scene of his birth. 
 
 By this time his fellows have gone down to the 
 shore, and are stalking along by the edge of the sea, 
 whose rim is at this moment just visible on the 
 horizon. 
 
 Out on the moor we may find the nest. Not much 
 of a nest indeed, but there are the empty shells still 
 lying tucked one inside another. 
 
 The cry of the curlew is a musical, if a mournful, 
 sound. But the bird has another note, and the 
 voices of a company flying together are not unlike 
 those of a pack of dogs. Stories are current, among 
 the hills of Devon, of a ghostly huntsman, who with 
 his viewless pack careers across the sky on wild 
 nights in winter. The belated moorman hears in the 
 call of the curlews the ominous baying of the ' whisht- 
 hounds,' and shudders as he hears. For it is death 
 to see them. Ruin will fall upon the house over 
 which they linger in their flight. 
 
 The rain has ceased. The clouds clear off as 
 swiftly as they formed ; the sky is blue and fair. On
 
 94 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 the sky-line a quaint figure on a rough pony beckons 
 us up the slope. It is Bill Mann, best known of 
 Dartmoor worthies. A flash of lightning, that thirty 
 years ago set his little house ablaze, has left him lame ; 
 but he is a true son of the chase for all his lameness, 
 and knows every fox and badger holt in the country 
 side, and every likely pool on the river. Between his 
 toothless gums is his inch of black clay. Round his 
 battered hat are coiled carefully his favourite flies. 
 It is not a bad morning, he says. He has marked 
 down a pack of ' black'ock ' on that rise in front. 
 
 He loosens the dog. After a bound of recognition 
 the setter goes off across the moor at the top of his 
 speed, as if there were no such thing as a blackcock 
 within forty miles. 
 
 All at once, he stops short, stiffened in every limb ; 
 to use old Bill's favourite expression, ' as stiff's a gig.' 
 We advance with firm and eager tread, our minds 
 intent upon the dog. 
 
 There is a rustle among the grass of a little hollow, 
 right under his nose. Up they get, with a great 
 rush, two noble cocks. They are down, right and 
 left. 
 
 The dog just glances at them. His work is not 
 done. There are more yet. Slowly he advances 
 some twenty yards further, his eyes riveted on a 
 great patch of ling in front of him. There they go, 
 a cock and two hens. The hens go by > we give 
 them law. Except by accident, they are never shot.
 
 The Misty Moorland. 95 
 
 But the cock has met his fate. He is down. He flutters 
 a moment and is still. 
 
 Is there any man who never knew the pang that 
 follows swiftly on the first keen flush of triumph, when, 
 with a flutter of failing wings, the noble bird falls, 
 struck down in mid-career; when the wanderer of 
 the air is dashed a helpless heap of feathers on the 
 ground ? 
 
 Is there anyone who never felt a touch of remorse 
 as the beautiful eyes, fast fading in death, gazed up at 
 him, bold and fearless to the last ? 
 
 The day wears on. After an hour's camp in a 
 sunny hollow Bill finds us another pack. We do 
 well. Ten fine cocks in all are slung on the saddle 
 of the little pony, and there is an ' accident ' or two 
 hidden away somewhere among the baggage. 
 
 It is a good day's work. Ten birds, and five-and- 
 twenty miles of moor. 
 
 As we strike across the heath and gain the old 
 miners' path, and plod cheerily homeward down the 
 hilly road, we wonder which is the greater happiness, 
 which the nobler sport five brace of birds earned by 
 honest toil among these noble wilds, or five hundred 
 shot down with the aid of a battery of guns, an army 
 of beaters, and all the machinery of a sanguinary 
 battue ? 
 
 We have reached the edge of the moor. The 
 dusk is settling down over the lonely hills. Long 
 since the sun went down behind the low horizon. The
 
 96 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 mist of evening rising faint and grey is reddening in 
 the afterglow. Purple shadows gather on the darken- 
 ing hills. 
 
 ' Silence and twilight, unbeloved of men, 
 Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.
 
 FOOTPRINTS ON THE SAND. 
 
 T N the evening of the year, when in the woodland 
 walk we miss the feathered wanderers who, in the 
 silence of these moonlight nights, are returning to their 
 winter haunts ; when no longer round our gables floats 
 the graceful figure of the swallow ; when the twitter of 
 the martins sounds no more from their nests beneath 
 the eaves, there reappear along the sea those familiar 
 forms whose presence lends such an added charm to 
 the beauty of the shore. 
 
 The sea is to all men ever a delight. There are 
 none who do not love its musical rhythm, its moods of 
 storm and calm, the wonder of its rest, the terror of its 
 rage. 
 
 Greater still is the charm which the lover of nature 
 finds at every step along its shores. He loves the 
 weeds, of bright hue and delicate form, which the 
 waters have torn up from quiet depths and heaped 
 among the shingle ; the strange creatures stranded by 
 the tide ; the myriad shells that ocean strews along 
 
 7
 
 98 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 the sand. The very markings by its edge, lines a 
 child at play might have traced with aimless finger, are 
 to him a picture-writing on the sand, in which he 
 reads the story of tiny creatures whose home is in the 
 waves. 
 
 But dearer than all must ever be the children of the 
 air. Plainest among these fleeting records are the 
 imprints of their feet. Here, run the devious tracks of 
 the sandpipers that troop along the tide. There, in 
 bolder characters are the footprints of the curlew. 
 Scattered over the mud are marks that tell how oyster- 
 catcher and redshank, gull and heron, wandered up 
 and down at sunrise, and left their sign-manual on the 
 yielding surface. 
 
 In the early summer these traces are but far between. 
 In the summer-time we look in vain for the white 
 wings of the gull ; we see no clouds of sandpipers ; we 
 seldom hear the whistle of the plover. As spring 
 advanced they left us. Gradually disappearing from 
 the low shores where they had spent the winter, they 
 gathered round their crowded breeding haunts. They 
 mustered in armies in the sanctuary of seagirt rocks ; 
 they gathered in clouds along the steep sides of 
 northern cliffs. 
 
 Some birds that haunt the wintry beach are content 
 with the limits of our islands. Others find a summer 
 resting-place no nearer than the shores of Siberia. 
 But among them are some who do not move at all ; 
 they spend the summer here ; they watch the vanish-
 
 Footprints on the Sand. gg 
 
 ing dunlins ; they see the flocks of scaup-ducks dwind- 
 ling from the waters of the bay ; they hear no more 
 the clamour of the gulls. But no impulse of migration 
 stirs their pulses. They are content to stay, and by 
 some solitary shore where no passing steps disturb 
 their peace find a spot where they may rear their 
 broods. 
 
 At the mouth of the tidal river whose mud-stained 
 waters go to swell the brown flood of Severn, a mass 
 of limestone lifts its head above the sea. The rugged 
 surface is stained with vivid lichens. Tufts of purple 
 thrift bloom among the sea-worn stones. The golden 
 samphire that clusters about the summit shows the top 
 safe above the highest tides. It is the sanctuary of 
 the oyster-catcher. The fisherman, drifting down the 
 stream to visit his nets out at sea, knows well the 
 watchful figures of the old birds, whose conspicuous 
 dress and long red beaks are so plain to see ; but the 
 solitude of the little islet is rarely broken, and year by 
 year the oyster-catchers lead down their little family to 
 the river. There is no nest of any sort. The eggs 
 are laid on the bare rock; but sometimes the birds 
 are found to smear them with mud, as if prompted 
 by past losses to take some precautions for conceal- 
 ment. 
 
 On the mud that borders the island stands a shel- 
 drake a handsome bird, whose brilliant plumage 
 makes him at once one of the most beautiful and 
 striking figures of the shore. Here at least he is a 
 
 72
 
 loo By Leafy Ways. 
 
 constant resident, though many of his clan come to us 
 only in the winter to escape the rigour of a northern 
 climate. Here, however, he finds a solitude to suit 
 him, and stays the summer through. Somewhere by 
 the shore he and his handsome mate, whose colours 
 are as striking as his own, make their nest in a rabbit- 
 burrow. At the far end, sometimes as much as ten 
 feet from the entrance, some dry grass is collected ; 
 over this the duck arranges a bed of down, which, like 
 the eider, she tears from her own body. Frequently 
 the hole is among the sand-hills, in the shelter of 
 sedge and sea holly. 
 
 But often a safer retreat is found in the side of a 
 hill looking down on the sea. Walled about with low 
 limestone cliffs, whose grey buttresses stand out here 
 and there among green waves of ivy, lies a little hollow 
 open to the south. The bushes that clothe its sides 
 are dwarfed and twisted by the wind. The plants that 
 cover the parched and scanty soil are such as flourish 
 in the sand. Here, is a patch of pale green wood- 
 sage ; there, a belt of rustling flags, not the bright iris 
 of the meadow-brook, but a flower of dusky hue with 
 sombre colouring and unpleasing odour. Here, the 
 yellow mullein lifts its tall head above the bracken. 
 Here, hang the dark bells of the deadly nightshade. 
 There, open the pallid petals of the henbane. Plea- 
 santer to the eye is the white rock-rose, which in this 
 favoured spot scatters its rare and graceful blossoms 
 broadcast over the rugged ground. Bright butterflies
 
 Footprints on the Sand. 101 
 
 love the hot sun that beats into the hollow. Grass- 
 snakes warm their cold hearts upon the heated sand. 
 
 A stoat peers out from a heap of stone, his head 
 and fore-paws just visible over the edge of a rock. 
 After a brief inspection he seems to think it best to 
 avoid us ; he drops down and disappears. 
 
 Here are the traces of the sheldrake a few white 
 feathers, tinged with brown, scattered on the grass at 
 the entrance of one of the many rabbit-holes which 
 here honeycomb the hill. Far inside the burrow the 
 empty eggshells still lie about the disordered nest. 
 
 Long ere this the brood stole out into the daylight, 
 and made their way down the rocks into the sea. 
 Sometimes, in the early morning, you may meet them 
 on the river. The old bird leads the way, the downy 
 brood all in line after their anxious parent. At the 
 sound of oars she turns her head a moment, and then 
 quickens her pace. At her signal the little fellows in 
 her wake hurry after her as best they may. The old 
 bird at last reluctantly takes wing. Her brood hasten 
 this way and that, dodging the oar-blades put out to 
 stop them, and scudding along with quick beats of 
 their little paddles. Some scramble up the bank. 
 Others swim out to sea down the rapid current. 
 
 The rocky side of the down is a favourite haunt of 
 the kestrel. Even the peregrine lingers here, and his 
 keen wings are still the terror of the farm under the 
 hill. More satisfactory tenants are the daws who 
 crowd about the cliff-ledges and build their nests by
 
 IO2 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 scores in the old rabbit-holes along the fringe of the 
 down. 
 
 The wide stretch of mud below, whose shining levels 
 wear a tinge of purple in the failing light, is dotted 
 with the figures of unnumbered gulls, some in the pure 
 white and grey of perfect plumage, others still wearing 
 the brown dress of youth. Redshanks and curlews 
 wade among the pools and line the edges of the long 
 hollows worn by the retreating tide. 
 
 A troop of dunlins fly in close array along the edge 
 of the water. Now they settle down upon the mud. 
 Even at this height their musical voices sound above 
 the faint murmur of the waves. 
 
 The lazy sea beyond them, scarcely broken by a 
 ripple, stretches away to the dim horizon like a sheet 
 of glass. In the golden splendour under the sinking 
 sun there lies becalmed a single sail. The sea-line 
 melts into an amber haze, through which shows now 
 and then the faint outline of some distant craft. 
 Along the bold sickle of the shore rise the broken 
 ridges of the sandhills. Beyond them the blue lines of 
 far-off hills. Between lie the wide levels of the moor ; 
 here, white with peaceful hamlets clustering round the 
 grey towers of ancient churches; there, golden with 
 ungathered grain, whose ripened sheaves await the 
 harvest home. 
 
 On the bold headland yonder, whose rocky steep is 
 kindling in the light of sunset, a grey ruin looks down 
 upon the fruitful plain. Round the old walls there
 
 Footprints on the Sand. 103 
 
 rolls a sea of graves. The wind and the rain have 
 dealt but hardly with the ancient stones. No kindly 
 chisel clears the gathering moss with which Time has 
 blurred the rude inscriptions. The iron tongues, at 
 whose fierce summons all the country rose to face the 
 fleet of Spain, hang silent in the deserted belfry. In 
 a corner of the chuchyard, thick with nameless graves, 
 the form of many an ill-fated mariner whom the tide 
 has laid upon the shore, has found a resting-place at 
 last. No headstones mark their rest; they lie un- 
 known 
 
 ' husbands, brothers, sons 
 Of desolate women in their far-off homes 
 Waiting to hear the step that never comes.'
 
 THE PARTING GUESTS. 
 
 ?-, VERY year, as autumn closes in, and 
 the air grows cool in the long Septem- 
 ber twilights ; when the still abundant 
 leafage is touched here and there with 
 the shades of brown and yellow that 
 ere long will ripen into gold and scarlet ; even the 
 least observant of us notice a change in the woods and 
 the lanes, and in the very streets of the city. 
 
 There are few who do not miss at least the swallow.
 
 The Parting Guests. 105 
 
 We remember, too, how the cuckoo grew hoarse, and 
 fitful, and then silent, long ago. We are conscious that 
 it is long since the nightingale, and the blackcap, and 
 a score of sylvan minstrels, cheered the woodland with 
 their varied strains. The landrail's inharmonious note 
 has been unheard since the early days of summer. 
 The swift vanished even before the fire was on the 
 leaves. 
 
 One after another, these and half a hundred others 
 of our summer guests have silently left their haunts in 
 field and lane and woodland for a sunnier climate and 
 a warmer air. They vanished, as they came, by 
 moonlight ; and the late October moon will light only 
 a few stragglers on their southward journey. 
 
 All, however, have not left us yet. On roofs and 
 rails, and along the convenient resting-place of tele- 
 graph-wires, troops of swallows are still gathering, with 
 no little interchange of gentle speech, and flutter of 
 careless wings. They are on the eve of setting out for 
 those far-off regions where no frost will mar the genial 
 comfort of the sunshine ; and where no shortness of 
 provisions will drive them from the ancestral home- 
 stead. 
 
 But we may expect to see them fairly often until the 
 end of this month ; a few during October ; and, on 
 the sea-coast especially, swallows and martins may be 
 observed as late as the end of November. 
 
 The swift is much more restricted in the time of his 
 arrival and departure. He is seldom here much
 
 io6 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 before May, and he leaves us in the beginning of 
 August. Stragglers may linger in September; one 
 only has ever been seen in November. 
 
 There is still some uncertainty with regard to the 
 movements of the cuckoo. He disappears from the 
 scene, to a great extent at least, when he loses his 
 voice ; and as far as the old birds are concerned it is 
 no doubt true that 
 
 ' In July he prepares to fly ; 
 In August go he must.' 
 
 There is, however, a version which goes on : 
 
 ' In September you'll him remember ; 
 But October he'll never get over.' 
 
 And the young birds certainly stay much later than 
 their parents. As late as the middle of August young 
 cuckoos have been seen in the act of being fed by 
 attendant wagtails. Your first impression will very 
 likely be that a hawk is devouring a brood of young 
 birds, and that the parents are uttering cries of distress. 
 But on approaching the spot you will find that it is a 
 cuckoo, not a hawk ; strong of wing, and apparently 
 well able to forage for itself, surrounded by a little 
 group of industrious wagtails busily occupied in 
 dropping food into its mouth; while the screams 
 proceed from the cuckoo itself, as with outspread 
 wings and gaping beak it calls continually for more. 
 Now and then one of its slaves will get even on its 
 back, so as to be able more easily to supply its wants. 
 The silence of the cuckoo in the late summer, and
 
 The Parting Guests. 107 
 
 its likeness to the sparrow-hawk, probably causes it to 
 be often mistaken for that bird ; in country districts 
 there are still some who believe that the cuckoo turns 
 into a hawk in the autumn. 
 
 Its winter home is in Africa, in the north especially, 
 though some even get as far as Natal. 
 
 This bird, like many of the migrants, has been kept 
 in this country in confinement through the winter ; 
 but it is worthy of note that captive cuckoos are said 
 never to feed themselves, even although they may live 
 late into the spring. 
 
 It has been confidently stated that the ' migratory 
 instinct ' was too strong to admit of this captivity : 
 that whatever care might be taken to provide food and 
 warmth for it, the hapless captive would, when the 
 usual time for departure drew near, grow restless, and 
 finally beat its life out against the bars of its prison. 
 But some migratory birds, the nightingale for example, 
 have been known to breed in captivity. 
 
 The corncrake migrates to the extreme south of 
 Africa a long journey for a bird whose powers of 
 flight are apparently so feeble that, when flushed, it 
 seldom goes more than fifty yards without alighting. 
 
 Although most of the tribe go away in September, 
 corncrakes are often killed in the stubble in October, 
 or even later ; and instances are recorded in which 
 they have been found in a torpid state in holes, 
 apparently hybernating, even in the month of February, 
 so lately as the year 1882.
 
 io8 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 The migratory warblers winter in Africa ; some, like 
 the blackcap, in the far south ; others, such as the 
 nightingale, in the region near Abyssinia. Some even 
 stay in the South of Europe, while, in the case of the 
 chiffchaff, a few probably do not leave England at all. 
 
 The chiffchaff is, indeed, a faithful friend ; a guest 
 who comes early and lingers late. Some birds desert 
 us on the threshold of the changing season almost 
 ere the first fall of the leaf; most of them before the 
 autumn days draw in and the twilight air has a touch 
 of frost in it. The cuckoo leads the way ; the swift 
 will almost overtake her on her passage south ; the 
 nightingale, the flycatcher, the redstart, and all the 
 rest of the light-winged host, follow in their train. 
 
 But the note of the chiffchaff still resounds in the 
 deserted glades. When the October sunset is red 
 with the funeral pyre of the departed summer; when 
 the coral chains of the bryony and the golden leaves 
 of the maple light up the country lanes ; when 
 
 ' like living coals, the apples 
 Burn among the withering leaves ' 
 
 still the chiffchaff lingers ; and far on in the year, in 
 the mournful silence of the leafless woodlands, you 
 may hear him still. He is the rearguard of the re- 
 tiring legions ; he is in the van of the returning army. 
 For when, in the early springtime, the copses have their 
 first tinge of tender green, he will come back to us a 
 humble, faithful, welcome visitor.
 
 FLYING, FLYING SOUTH, 
 
 ^THE genial sunshine of bright September days half 
 tempts us to forget the stormy moods of an un- 
 gracious summer. 
 
 True it is that cold and clinging mists linger late 
 into the mornings; sadly true that the days are 
 shortening fast, and that evening airs are chill ; that 
 now and then there is a touch of frost upon the 
 meadows, and a film of ice upon the pools. 
 
 But a look of summer lingers in the landscape ; the 
 woods still wear their summer dress. Worn and 
 faded are the leaves, pierced and torn by myriad 
 caterpillars, but still the trees are green, hardly touched 
 as yet by the fiery fingers of the Autumn. The foliage 
 of the beech is thinning fast ; the dry leaves of the 
 lime begin to rustle on the path. But there is not 
 
 yet 
 
 ' The wonder of the falling tongues of flame ' 
 
 that crowning glory of chill October. 
 
 In the strange autumnal stillness the leaves hang
 
 no By Leafy Ways. 
 
 motionless in the voiceless woods, as if waiting for 
 their fall. 
 
 The air is crowded with innumerable insects. 
 Gnats in cloudy columns short-lived children of the 
 autumn rise like phantoms from the river-path. 
 Millions of ephemera spend in the twilight their brief 
 span of life born after sundown, dying ere the 
 dawn. 
 
 Hosts of dusky moths hover round the lingering 
 flowers. 
 
 The. hush of night grows deeper as the grasshopper 
 chirps at intervals his drowsy strain. 
 
 But careless of the noonday warmth, and not 
 tempted by the store of insect life, the swallows 
 knowing perhaps by bitter experience how suddenly 
 the food supply may fail, prompted by some myste- 
 rious sense of coming winter have all, except a few 
 stragglers, left us even earlier than usual. Even in 
 August the movement began. No later than the 
 middle of the month vast flights of swallows collected 
 and started on their journey. 
 
 Led by no skilful pilot not even guided by pre- 
 vious knowledge they gained their first experience, 
 for the young birds of the year, strange as it may 
 seem, went first. The parents followed with their 
 second broods. 
 
 Some stragglers still remain, who, here to-day and 
 gone to-morrow, hurry southward in the track of the 
 legions.
 
 Flying, flying South. in 
 
 Swallows have been seen at Christmas ; still more 
 rarely, in the two months that follow. 
 
 Fast and far the little travellers will fly. The road 
 is long ; there are perils by the way. Cold and hunger 
 will thin the ranks ; kite and falcon will harass the 
 defenceless columns. Of those who reach the African 
 shore some will stay to the north of the Sahara ; 
 others will wander far to southward down the western 
 coast ; many will winter even at the Cape. 
 
 They have been with us nearly half the year. In 
 April, or even earlier, the vanguard crossed the sea. 
 A few weeks of holiday followed their return. A few 
 weeks on the river, a few weeks of the free life of the 
 heavens, and then they settled down to the serious 
 business of the season. 
 
 Last year's nest perhaps their home for many 
 summers was repaired. Or if in the interval some 
 Vandal had swept away the fragile walls a new one 
 was commenced. It is a shallow structure, built of 
 moist and kneaded earth, gathered up in the road or 
 by the bank of a stream. 
 
 It is generally out of sight. Here in a disused 
 chimney, there among the rafters of an outhouse, 
 sometimes even in a well. Two cases are recorded in 
 which swallows built in trees. 
 
 It is true that swallows sometimes build in more 
 open situations ; but the nests over the cottage window, 
 the clay-built homes that cluster thick along the eaves, 
 are the work of another mason the house-martin.
 
 112 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 The birds have marked points of difference ; 
 but unlike as are their ways, their plumage, and 
 their song, they are constantly mistaken for each 
 other. 
 
 They are often seen in company. Together they 
 skim the surface of the pool, among the crowds of 
 water-loving insects. Together they soar far up into 
 the blue heaven, until the sight can scarcely follow 
 their figures on the sky. 
 
 But the naturalist distinguishes far off their form 
 and flight. He contrasts the long and deeply forked 
 tail of the swallow with the shallower notch and 
 shorter feathers of the martin. The throat of the 
 swallow is broadly marked with chestnut, bordered 
 with a band of deep blue black. The martin wears 
 pure white on throat and body, and carries also a 
 conspicuous patch of white over its tail. 
 
 The swallow is a familiar bird. Well known to us 
 all are the sound of its voice and the sheen of its 
 wings. But although ever)' man knows, or thinks he 
 knows, the harbinger of spring, it is rare to see either 
 a swallow or a martin correctly drawn outside the 
 pages of a book on Natural History. 
 
 Very different from either is the swift, who indeed 
 does not belong to the family at all, and more re- 
 sembles the humming-bird in his structure. His long 
 wings are curved like a bow. His sable plumage is 
 relieved by one faint touch of white upon the throat, 
 hardly visible, save when at some turn of his rapid
 
 Flying, flying South. 113 
 
 flight, the bird hangs for a moment almost motionless 
 in the air. 
 
 The swallow and the martin stay with us the summer 
 through. They even linger in the autumn. But the 
 swift is more a child of the south than either. He 
 comes in May and goes in August. Brief indeed for 
 
 him is 
 
 ' the sun of summer in the north.' 
 
 The feet of the swallow, although small and slender, 
 have a general resemblance to those of most other 
 birds. 
 
 The tiny feet of the martin are feathered to the 
 toes. 
 
 The foot of the swift, covered with bristle-like 
 feathers, and with all four claws placed in front, is 
 more like the paw of a small quadruped. 
 
 Although the swift never settles on a tree, and very 
 rarely even on a roof, it often clings to the wall at the 
 entrance of its nest, and its claws are strong enough 
 to take a piece clean out of the hand of an incautious 
 captor. 
 
 Little as we see of the swallow engaged in rearing 
 its young, the habits of the swift are even less familiar. 
 We see nothing of its nest unless we raise the tiles 
 where, far up under the roof, the bird crouches on the 
 scanty handful of grass and feathers she has caught 
 up in her flight. 
 
 The life history of the martin is better known to us. 
 We watch the graceful little builders clinging to the 
 
 8
 
 ii4 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 wall of their unfinished nest. We see the two fairy- 
 like figures nestling side by side within the hollow, 
 and hear them whisper little staves of song. 
 
 The hen bird, brooding on her eggs, shows at times 
 her glossy crown and a touch of her pure white throat 
 over the rim of the nest. 
 
 Later still four little heads are seen looking out into 
 the world. Then conies the first plunge into the air. 
 All the neighbours take 'an interest in the great event. 
 Now they sail up to the nest, poising in the air a 
 moment with a twitter of encouragement ; now ad- 
 vancing, now retiring, trying all they know to tempt 
 the timid novices to spread their unproved wings ; 
 and when at last one of the little crew takes heart and 
 launches out into the airy deep, with what a chorus 
 do they welcome to their ranks the bold adven- 
 turer ! 
 
 Now, young and old alike, swift and swallow and 
 martin, have turned their backs upon our shores ; 
 loitering here in the sunny streets of Pisa, lingering 
 there in warm Algerian highlands, but still moving 
 south, until they rest at last in lands of endless 
 summer. 
 
 The sight of the last swallow is like the first footfall 
 of approaching Winter, ominous of rain and snow ; of 
 stinging east and bitter weather. 
 
 How we shall watch for his return ! Many migrants 
 come and go unheeded. We listen indeed to the cry 
 of the cuckoo; we hear with rapture the anthem of
 
 Flying, flying South. 115 
 
 the nightingale. But there are scores of birds, who 
 cross the sea and settle here for the season, of whom 
 the world takes little heed. 
 
 But it is otherwise with the swallow. No bird is 
 better known. No bird is so suggestive of the summer. 
 No other calls up so vividly memories of Halcyon 
 Days. 
 
 With what joy we watch the first solitary swallow on 
 the April sky ! It is a sign to tell us Spring is born. 
 It is the time of violets. Copses are ringing with the 
 songs of thrush and blackbird. Overhead floats the 
 music of the lark. Then comes the swallow on his 
 sunny wings back from his perilous voyage to the old 
 roof whose thatch has sheltered him so long. 
 
 What sweeter sound of springtime than his matin 
 song from the brown gable of the barn ? What 
 brighter touch of summer in the landscape than his 
 figure high in air, floating on glad wings amid scores 
 of happy comrades whose life is sunshine and whose 
 speech is song ? 
 
 82
 
 THE RETURN OF THE FIELDFARE. 
 
 ~\ X 7HEN the swallow and his clan have deserted 
 for the winter their haunts among the smoke- 
 blackened roofs of the city, no bird is found who, in 
 any sense, fills their places. 
 
 Most of the starlings go away to join the legions 
 that muster by the sea or on the moorland. 
 
 Only the sparrow stays. No one ever sees his sooty 
 coat among the handsome dresses of his country 
 cousins. 
 
 But out in the fields the case is different. We miss 
 indeed the crowd of birds who came to us in the
 
 The Return of the Fieldfare. 117 
 
 spring, and have spent the summer here. We see no 
 more the nightingale and the blackcap, the cuckoo 
 and the redstart. 
 
 They have long been silent. They have vanished 
 in the dark, unseen, unheard, and their going has 
 been hardly noticed. 
 
 By the time we are conscious of their absence, the 
 fields and the lanes, the hills and the marshes, have a 
 new set of tenants, who drop silently into the vacant 
 places. The midsummer play indeed is over, but we 
 shall see a new set of actors among the winter scenery. 
 
 They are not a musical set ; but they make up in 
 movement what they lack in melody, and their pre- 
 sence goes far to console us for our lost companions. 
 
 Conspicuous among them all is the smart figure of 
 the fieldfare, handsomest of familiar thrushes. 
 
 On the eve of the long winter he leaves his home, in 
 Norway or Siberia, and comes southward to these 
 islands, to France and Spain, wandering even as far 
 as Africa. In mild seasons, when the summer lingers 
 late into the autumn, the fieldfare does not reach us 
 till October, and his appearance earlier is considered 
 an omen of a harder year than usual. 
 
 When on the orchard-boughs the fruit glows red 
 through dying leaves, when the hedgerow maple dons 
 its dress of gold, we shall see, far up on the grey sky, 
 the even lines of the invaders, and hear their voices 
 floating downward through the sharp October air. 
 
 But we shall not see much of them yet. When the
 
 n8 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 wind has shaken down the rustling leaves upon the 
 forest path we may mark them better. When the bare 
 black boughs stand clear cut against the frosty sky we 
 shall see their figures in the leafless elm, or watch 
 them on the upland pasture, whose coarse herbage, 
 browned with the sun of summer, is stiffening with 
 rime. 
 
 Along a lonely hillside winds a grassy road, seldom 
 marked even by the track of wheels, save when some 
 lumbering waggon brings down the thin sheaves of the 
 scanty upland harvest. 
 
 Over the broad hedges wanders the traveller's joy, 
 whose seeds, like tufts of light grey feathers, mingle 
 with the bright fruit of the wayfaring-tree. 
 
 Above the road rise the round shoulders of the 
 hill, with masses of grey limestone showing here and 
 there through a rough coat of gorse and heather. 
 
 Facing the far end of the lane rises a steep cliff, in 
 whose crevices the rowan finds a footing, and the 
 silvery leaves of the white beam mingle with the dark 
 leafage of the yew. 
 
 Below the road broad fields sweep gently down to 
 the moor. Here they are flanked with a fringe of 
 larches ; there a few storm-beaten fir-trees cluster 
 about the rude earthworks of an ancient camp. 
 
 The tall straggling hedgerows are bright with haws ; 
 touched even with the vivid colour of the spindle or 
 the jewelled clusters of the nightshade. 
 
 Over all there broods the silence of the autumn.
 
 The Return of the Fieldfare. ng 
 
 No sound disturbs the quiet save the scream of a jay 
 in the shadows of the larchwood, the cry of a hawk as 
 he drifts along the grey rampart of the hill, or the call 
 of a woodpecker from the dim recesses of the orchard. 
 
 High up in the tall ash that leans out of the hedge- 
 row sits a fieldfare, keeping sharp look-out on all the 
 world below. 
 
 The finches and yellow-hammers take little heed as 
 you move with quiet footfall down the grassy way. 
 
 But the fieldfare has eyes for everything. He is on 
 sentry. 
 
 Scattered over the ground in the next pasture is the 
 flock of his companions. There is a gate yonder from 
 which you may watch them. But the sentry gives a 
 warning call. The foraging party look up, and in- 
 stantly take wing for the trees that skirt the meadow. 
 
 There are few shyer birds than the fieldfare whsn 
 first he comes to us a stranger ; and as long as the 
 weather keeps mild it will not be easy to get within 
 reach of him. But when the ground grows hard 
 under the breath of Winter, and the hedgerow fruits 
 alone afford them a scanty living, fieldfares become 
 more bold, and venture nearer the abodes of man. 
 Should the cold continue, they will go farther south, 
 and we shall see no more of them until they pass us 
 in the spring on their homeward journey 
 
 Hewitson, who was the first Englishman to describe 
 the breeding haunts of the fieldfare, found the birds 
 building in companies hundreds of nests together in
 
 I2O By Leafy Ways. 
 
 the forest. It is quite common, however, to find 
 them singly, though several are often found within a 
 few yards. 
 
 The nest, made of grass and twigs, and stiffened 
 with mud like that of the blackbird, is built in a tree, 
 but from necessity, or perhaps merely from choice, is 
 sometimes placed on the ground. 
 
 No precautions seem to be taken for concealment. 
 The great structure is often so close to the road that 
 the traveller may look into it as he passes. 
 
 But farther north, among the wild arctic fiords or in 
 the solitude of the Lofoden islands, the bird finds a 
 spot that to us at least seems more in keeping with 
 her love of quiet. 
 
 Land on the shore of one of the little bays among 
 the islands. Cross the beach among the boulders, 
 fringed with rich brown seaweed, the haunt of gull 
 and cormorant, as the broken echinus shells strewn 
 about will testify, and stroll up the little valley that 
 winds away among the sterile hills. 
 
 Huge masses of rock, torn by frost and tempest 
 from the rugged crests on either hand, lie piled along 
 the sides, half hidden among the cool foliage of stunted 
 birch-trees. 
 
 All the valley glows with the rich green herbage 
 which the fierce sun of the brief northern summer and 
 the warm waves of the great ocean current make so 
 strangely fair. Knee-deep rise the grass and ferns 
 along a little stream that idly wanders seaward under
 
 The Return of the Fieldfare. 121 
 
 a canopy of waving green. Tall globe-flowers mark 
 with their golden bells the devious course of the 
 rivulet. 
 
 Under the shadow of a boulder, where to the 
 barren ground clings a thick growth of tiny Alpine 
 heaths, there is a quick rustle as of some moving 
 animal. Two lemmings graceful, gentle creatures, 
 suggestive half of dormouse, half of guinea-pig roll 
 over and over down the slope and frolic almost at 
 your feet. You lean down to watch them closer, but 
 the bright eyes catch sight of a moving figure; the 
 little fellows have vanished into their hole. 
 
 A heap of broken egg-shells shows that grouse have 
 nested here, and no doubt plenty of willow-grouse 
 and ptarmigan are crouching even now among this 
 broken ground. 
 
 The sound of footsteps disturbs a bird from the 
 clustering birches that spread their lace-like foliage 
 over the stream. There she goes ! A fieldfare. And 
 among the branches, not six feet from the ground, is 
 the nest. The four eggs in it are not distinguishable 
 from those of the blackbird. 
 
 These are the second brood. The first, like those 
 of English thrushes, were hatched much earlier in the 
 season. 
 
 The young birds will not see much of their native 
 land this year. But few weeks remain to them before 
 they must turn their faces to the south. 
 
 It must be a hard climate from which they
 
 122 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 are driven thus to the tender mercies of an English 
 winter. 
 
 What a spot the old birds fixed on for their home ! 
 For six weeks the sun never sets upon their island. 
 Six weeks of daylight shine upon their happy valley. 
 Day after day there meets their eyes that wonder that 
 greeted the astonished gaze of ' Othere, the old sea 
 captain,' when 
 
 ' Round in a fiery ring, 
 Went the great sun, O King, 
 With red and lurid light.' 
 
 What a vision of glory is this sunlit midnight ! The 
 amber of the twilight sky shades into soft purple down 
 on the horizon. The sea, a fiery opal in the light of 
 the level sun, shines in ever-changing tints of green 
 and orange and crimson. 
 
 A line of blue lies like a rare setting to the 
 wild islands, the faint far outlines of whose innumer- 
 able peaks lie bathed in softest tones of rose and 
 amethyst. 
 
 Above all is the wonder of the unsetting sun, whose 
 path of glory lights the glittering waves.
 
 TITE SUMMER OF SAINT MARTIN 
 
 are midway through the autumn. The time is 
 far advanced,' and winter lingers at the gate. 
 But, as we look across the landscape, we find almost 
 more of summer in it than of autumn still. We have 
 indeed felt the print of icy fingers ; flowers have long 
 been fading at the fatal touch, and hilltops have been 
 white with early snow. But just as we begin to think 
 that winter is upon us, the air grows soft and gentle, 
 and there broods over the land the glamour of the 
 Indian summer. 
 
 ' The summer and the winter here, 
 
 Midway a truce are holding ; 
 A soft, consenting atmosphere 
 Their tents of peace enfolding.' 
 
 It is a time of rest and calm. Ended are all the 
 trials and troubles of the wayward season. The har- 
 vest has been gathered in, and in orderly array the 
 corn-stacks cluster round the quiet homesteads. In
 
 124 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 the silent orchard alleys there shine, like glowing 
 emhers, heaps of fallen apples. 
 
 The woodlands even yet have hardly donned their 
 fullest splendour, but we read the story of the season 
 on the leaves of many a noble tree. Some there are 
 still draped in summer green, save that a single spray 
 hangs here and there, shining among the sombre 
 fol'age like beaten gold. 
 
 The beech grows red in the warm October sunshine. 
 The great wood pigeons that feed upon the fallen mast 
 fly up as steps draw near, and shake from the rattling 
 branches a shower of colour with their flapping wings. 
 
 One noble lime still wears, blended in exquisite 
 harmony, its varied tones of green, and brown, and 
 amber. Another, more gorgeous still, is perfect in its 
 dress of gold. 
 
 Day by day the black poplar strews fresh glory on 
 the path. The perfume that clung about its opening 
 foliage lingers no longer round the dying leaves. Its 
 neighbour, the stately walnut, whose grey arms are 
 growing quickly bare, is fragrant to the last, and its 
 brown and shrivelled leaves are scented still. 
 
 The fans of the horse-chestnut are glorious in 
 crimson and gold. The great trees are ablaze with 
 colour, and the rich brown of their riperiing fruit shines 
 through the rough green shells. 
 
 Starling and missel thrush have cleared from the 
 mountain-ash the coral clusters of its brilliant fruit 
 but the tree has not lost its glory yet ; the russet leaves
 
 The Summer of Saint Martin. 125 
 
 have a softer beauty of their own. The broad leaves 
 of the plane, here pale yellow, there brightened with a 
 touch of crimson, now deepening into brown, are 
 falling fast. 
 
 In the voiceless woods, where the warm hues of 
 beech and maple shine like the rich windows of some 
 vast cathedral, the trees stand motionless in the scented 
 air. A faint breath of wind, that just stirs the topmost 
 twigs upon the elm, brings down a shower of leaves 
 that patter like drops of hail upon the branches. 
 Elsewhere, a solemn stillness, broken only by the faint 
 sound of falling leaves. First conies a little movement 
 overhead, as the leaf loosens at last, and for all time, 
 its hold upon the parent bough ; a moment of silence 
 again as the little waif floats gently down, and then a 
 rustle in the underwood as one more touch of colour 
 is added to the ever-changing carpet of brown and 
 scarlet, of russet and of gold. 
 
 Nor is the glory only overhead. The tiny leaves of 
 the burnet are turning crimson. Trailing sprays of 
 bramble glow with vivid tints. Brilliant fungi, brown, 
 and red, and yellow, lend their colours in the place of 
 vanished flowers ; others, pale and delicate, are strewn 
 like seed pearls among green waves of trailing moss. 
 
 The frosts that gild the maple and the lime are 
 bringing from the north a host of winter visitors. It is 
 the season when, fleeing from the terrors of the black 
 and bitter north, there streams over the sea, night after 
 night, the vast array of hurrying fugitives. At the close
 
 126 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 of day, and when through a golden mist the sun sinks 
 in the west ; when soft grey clouds that bar the quiet 
 sky swiftly take colour and glow like plumes of fire ; 
 when after a brief gleam of glory the dark comes down 
 upon the silent fields ; when roofs, that drip with dew, 
 shine like sheets of silver in the splendour of the 
 moon, there sets in, through the tranquil hours of 
 night, the rush of innumerable wings. 
 
 On moonlight nights, when skies are cloudless and 
 the air is clear, the birds pass high overhead, far 
 beyond the range of sight or sound. But dark or 
 cloudy weather compels them to fly lower down in 
 order to find their bearings. For the path of migration 
 is no vague, mysterious road, followed unconsciously 
 by some blind impulse of unreasoning instinct. It is 
 a path discovered by experience, and followed year by 
 year with the help of familiar waymarks which the 
 birds can see far down beneath them as they fly. 
 
 It is no doubt a prompting of instinct which leads 
 the young birds, who never yet have left their native 
 land, to start before their elders and drift aimlessly 
 over the sea towards hitherto unknown regions in the 
 southward. But those who know the way stay later, 
 and probably follow some recognised and regular 
 route. 
 
 In fair weather the movements of the birds of 
 passage are seldom seen. It is on dark and stormy 
 nights nights of rough weather and of inky gloom 
 that the lighthouse-keepers, hundreds of whom are on
 
 The Summer of Saint Martin. 127 
 
 the watch, become aware of the passing of the vast 
 array. 
 
 On such a night the air is crowded with myriads of 
 flying forms, wheeling round the lantern, coming up 
 like phantoms out of the darkness, seen for a moment 
 in the glare, and then disappearing in the gloom. The 
 air is filled with screams, and cries, and strange un- 
 earthly voices, and the rustling of innumerable wings. 
 Thousands of birds are taken while dazzled with the 
 light ; thousands dash their lives out against the fatal 
 splendour. Sometimes, even, hurled through the 
 glass by the tremendous impulse of their flight, they 
 fall lifeless on the light-room floor among the fragments 
 of the shattered lantern. 
 
 During the migratory period, which lasts only for a 
 few weeks, birds are continually making the journey, 
 but there are two great flights each season, separated by 
 an interval of a fortnight or more. The migrants seem 
 to care little for rain or darkness, or even for unfavour- 
 able winds ; but it has been observed that the passage 
 of the great flocks is frequently the signal of approach- 
 ing storms, and that they often take advantage of a 
 lull to leave their summer quarters. The worst of 
 weather will not delay them long, and this long spell 
 of calm will no doubt have brought troops of birds 
 from the chilled regions of the north. 
 
 Already the bright eyes of the woodcock have been 
 seen in the covers. Already the bay is dotted with 
 the dark figures of scaup-ducks. The widgeons have
 
 128 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 ound their way to the pools among the marshes, and 
 strings of teal are reported from the river. 
 
 It is an ancestral haunt. A thousand years have 
 left but little sign in this quiet corner of the world. 
 Among the stately elms, that cluster under the hill 
 which skirts the moor, rise the square tower and mas- 
 sive masonry of an ancient priory. Rich meadows and 
 wide belts of fertile corn-land stretch away across the 
 level plain. Over the yellow sands there comes the 
 murmur of the sea. 
 
 ' There twice a day the Severn fills : 
 The salt sea water passes by, 
 And hushes half the babbling Wye, 
 And makes a silence in the hills.' 
 
 About the spot there cling dim memories of the 
 past. Phoenician captains moored their galleys in this 
 little river. Kelt and Saxon struggled for the mastery 
 of those wooded heights. 
 
 Long since scattered are the sandalled friars. For 
 three long centuries the dark rafters of the old ban- 
 queting-hall have rung with no sonorous chant, or 
 stave of reveller's song. The fish-ponds of the Priory 
 are choked with reeds. No stout-limbed churls clear 
 now the channels of the old decoy. 
 
 But among the brown and rustling flags that fill the 
 ditches still descend long flights of wild-fowl. Troops 
 of widgeon that have left their summer home at the 
 setting in of the long Arctic night hide among the 
 tasselled sedges that wave along the banks.
 
 The Summer of Saint Martin. 129 
 
 Still from their ancient nesting-place, among the 
 noble trees that clothe the steep sides of the hollow in 
 the distant hills, come down the herons. They fish in 
 the self-same ditches where, in bygone days, their 
 startled ancestors spread mighty wings to escape the 
 swift rush of the Prior's favourite falcon. Like the 
 friars, they too have fallen from their high estate. 
 But although no longer followed by the shouting 
 chase, protected by no stern penalty of jealous laws, 
 still by the quiet reaches of the little river, in the 
 moorland ditches, and along the level shore, these 
 ancient solitary anglers watch and wait.
 
 'A GREAT FREQUENTER OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 T N the later days of autumn, when the berries are 
 dwindling on the hedgerows, and the insects have 
 died by myriads in the frosty air ; when the birds, which 
 have not followed the custom of their fathers and 
 gone southward to a sunnier climate, begin to feel the 
 pinch of poverty, some of them collect in companies 
 and wander up and down in search of food ; others
 
 'A Great Frequenter of the Church.' 131 
 
 are driven in from the fields to the dwellings of man, 
 and lose for a time their accustomed shyness. 
 
 Some there are who always hang about the farm- 
 yard and the cover merely for the sake of plunder, 
 and are at constant feud with the farmer, like the 
 caitiff crow and his handsome cousin the magpie. 
 
 Others, again, like the hawfinch, always keep so far 
 aloof from sign or sound of labour that we hardly 
 realize their presence at all until even their shyness 
 gives way before the rigour of some bitter season, and 
 in their extremity they, too, have to look for corn in 
 Egypt. 
 
 A few birds constantly court the comp'any of man ; 
 some of them nest beneath his roof-tree ; most of them 
 are more or less dependent on his labours for their 
 living. The farmer and the rook, for instance, play 
 into each other's hands ; and were it not for the con- 
 venient shelter of roofs and rainwater pipes, the 
 sparrow and the starling would go far afield to find a 
 place of rest. 
 
 Less common and conspicuous than the rook, but 
 a zealous worker on the farm, and a faithful friend of 
 man, is the light-hearted jackdaw. 
 
 He constantly associates with his sable kinsmen. 
 He will follow the plough with the rook, and roam 
 the sea-beach with the crow, but his quicker move- 
 ments and his sharper speech distinguish him easily 
 from the former ; and although his character is nothing 
 to speak of, and his thievish ways are beyond denial. 
 
 92
 
 132 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 he is yet no sharer in the dark deeds of the 
 latter. 
 
 The history of the jackdaw, from the popular point 
 of view, consists largely of stories told to his discredit 
 concerning purloined spoons and misappropriated 
 jewellery, together with scraps of amusing speech. 
 
 His robberies are no doubt real enough, but his 
 articulation is seldom distinct, and one may well be 
 sceptical with regard to such anecdotes as that which 
 relates how a jackdaw was caught red handed in the 
 kitchen ; how the angry cook threw over him some 
 scalding broth ; how the disconsolate bird moped and 
 pined and tried to hide his featherless crown, until 
 one day, seeing a bald-headed gentleman among the 
 guests at dinner, he hopped upon the back of his chair 
 and cried, with recovered cheerfulness, ' So you've 
 been at the pickled cockles !' 
 
 ThQ jackdaw is given to wandering far in search of 
 food, and often accompanies the foraging parties of 
 the rookery. 
 
 It is a mingled crew that gathers on the upland 
 fields where the only sign of man's dominion is the 
 rich brown earth of newly-turned furrows. 
 
 From their ancestral elm-trees under the hill come 
 the solemn rooks, stately of gait and deliberate of 
 speech. 
 
 A party of rockdoves, after wheeling round and 
 round the field, settle down in a corner by them- 
 selves.
 
 * A Great Frequenter of the Church. 1 133 
 
 Here, a few lapwings run up and down, or sail 
 across the sky with melancholy cries. 
 
 There, is even a flock of gulls driven inland by 
 the rough weather, their white plumage contrasting 
 strongly with the dark dress of their companions. 
 
 And, scattered over the broad field, a troop of jack- 
 daws forage busily among the furrows. 
 
 One is at work so near that you can even see the 
 white iris of his eye and the grey patches in his coat. 
 But he has caught sight of you as you crouch behind 
 the wall. He rises with a warning cry. 
 
 The timid doves vanish swiftly on their sounding 
 wings. 
 
 The rooks rise all at once and drift slowly away 
 with loud and solemn caw. 
 
 The jackdaws, hastily collecting in a troop, chatter 
 gaily as they fly, and, with rapid beat of their dark 
 wings, make for the ravine whose rugged steeps are 
 just visible over the shoulder of the hill. 
 
 Jackdaws are fond of building in the rocks, whether 
 inland or by the sea, and one cannot help being 
 struck with the picturesqueness of the spots they fix 
 on for their dwellings. 
 
 Their breezy haunts, high up in these grand old 
 cliffs, are overgrown with a very jungle of trees of 
 every shade, that wreathe their arms about the rifted 
 crags. From their homes in these cool recesses the 
 birds look out hundreds of feet sheer down to the 
 winding road below.
 
 134 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 Along the valley of the Dart, where every wall of 
 sandstone shelters in its deep crevices a colony of 
 daws, the very ground is sometimes honeycombed 
 with their nests. 
 
 As you make your way slowly up the steep slope 
 that rises from the river, the birds fly out one after 
 another from their holes, and, collecting on the bushes 
 that fringe the cliff overhead, are loud in their ex- 
 pressions of disapprobation as you stoop to examine 
 their burrows expecting, no doubt, a confiscation of 
 their portable property a valuable collection of bits 
 of string, scraps of carpet, and nameless odds and 
 ends. 
 
 It is not often that the nests are actually made in 
 the ground. Still more rarely do the birds build 
 among the boughs of trees ; probably not more than 
 two authenticated cases of their doing so are on 
 record. 
 
 A favourite spot is the tower of a country church, 
 and on the worn stones of the turret stairway the jack- 
 daws pile their heaps of sticks sometimes literally a 
 cartload to a single nest. 
 
 In one instance the belfry was so choked with the 
 rubbish collected in less than a week by a pair of 
 these industrious architects, that the buried bell had 
 to be dug out by the sexton before it could be 
 rung. 
 
 Now, the jackdaws people with their dusky figures 
 the dismantled keep of some ruined stronghold.
 
 'A Great Frequenter of the Church.' 135 
 
 Rising above the clustering hamlet that long ago 
 gathered in its shadow, its 
 
 crumbling walls look down, 
 That played a stake for Charles's sake 
 In the game of Church and Crown. 
 
 The ivy that holds in friendly grasp the failing turrets 
 shelters in its knotted coils a multitude of birds. 
 
 Starlings pile their untidy nests in a hundred 
 niches. 
 
 In hollows torn, perhaps, by Roundhead shot, the 
 jackdaws rear their clamorous young. 
 
 One is tempted to fa-ncy that the daws which tenant 
 the unnumbered nooks in the great cathedral wear an 
 air of mystery and reserve, that harmonizes well with 
 their surroundings. There is an old-world look about 
 them. One can half imagine that there are legends 
 handed down among them of the historic pile in whose 
 shadow they and their ancestors have for centuries 
 found sanctuary; that as they flit among the stony- 
 eyed effigies of saints and warriors that people all 
 the noble front, their speech is of old memories 
 and bygone days. Laud and Still, Ken and Wolsey, 
 ruled in the solemn aisles beneath them. In the 
 cool arcades of the cloisters trembling monks have 
 talked with bated breath of the ill deeds of King 
 Harry. 
 
 Across the moor, in the ruins of the famous abbey, 
 again the daws have made a settlement. 
 
 Trailing creepers, that glow like fire under the touch
 
 136 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 of autumn, hang graceful wreaths round the ruined 
 windows. The roofless halls are hung with green 
 waves of ivy that cling about the broken arches and 
 twine lovingly round the shattered columns. A fringe 
 of fern-leaves hangs from every crevice. Wallflowers 
 bloom upon the graceful capitals. 
 
 Vandal hands have been laid upon the noble fabric. 
 Its sculptured stones are built into half the houses of 
 the little township. The very roads are paved with 
 its costly fragments. 
 
 It is the island valley of Avilion. Still 
 
 ' it lies 
 
 Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns 
 And bowery hollows.' 
 
 But the summer sea is now only a gleam of silver on 
 the far horizon. 
 
 And in the spring-time, when the great acacias, that 
 lean as if to caress the ruins with their gentle touch, 
 just show signs of budding green ; when the swaying 
 boughs of the beech that screens the roofless chapel 
 are bright with opening leaves, the jackdaws come 
 back from their winter wanderings and build their 
 nests here, in the niches of the ruined tower ; there, in 
 cosy nooks among the ivy. Now they settle down for 
 the season on the broken stairway that hangs midway 
 up the wall. 
 
 Over all there cling the memories of the vanished 
 years. The voice of Dunstan echoed in this empty 
 hall. Beneath that turf the bones of Arthur crumbled
 
 * A Great Frequenter of the Church.' 137 
 
 into dust. Up yonder hill the last Abbot went with- 
 out flinching to his shameful doom. The armed 
 rabble of ' King ' Monmouth lit their camp fires in 
 these very walls 
 
 And the troopers saw, by the wandering glare. 
 Grey, shadowy monks on the ruined stair ; 
 And trembling swore, the owls o'erhead 
 Were the restless ghosts of the angry dead.
 
 SVLVAN MINSTRELS. 
 
 *~~PHE woodland ways, still glorious in their rich 
 October dress, are yet sorrowful in their silence. 
 Amid all the splendour of the crimson and the gold 
 we miss the music of the birds. We miss the mellow 
 song of the blackcap, the hasty symphony of the 
 white-throat, the gentle cadence of the willow-wren, 
 and the voice of many a sweet songster beside. 
 
 It is true that there is no lack of life among the 
 trees. Here, a brown squirrel is racing over the 
 branches; or, seated on some level bough, with his 
 brush curled over his back, scatters the chips of fir- 
 cones on the ground beneath him ; or, peering from 
 behind the stem, watches with bright black eyes the 
 advance of the intruder. There, a merry party of long- 
 tailed titmice chase each other from tree to tree across 
 the wood. Little troops of gold-crests, clustering about 
 the pine-tops, raise their tiny voices rejoicing in the 
 sun. Now, the soft call-note of a bullfinch hardly 
 breaks the stillness ; now, the whole wood is ringing
 
 Sylvan Minstrels. 139 
 
 with the screams of a family of jays ; here, chimes in 
 the chatter of a magpie ; there, rises the alarm note of 
 a missel-thrush like the crash of breaking boughs in 
 wintry storms. No, there is no lack of movement, 
 but there is a dearth of music. 
 
 There are birds which sing, more or less, throughout 
 the year like our familiar and faithful friends the 
 robin and the wren. But the spring-time is the musical 
 season. 
 
 When the eggs are hatched the singers break off one 
 by one, and devote their energies to their family cares. 
 
 The male bird, who sang over and over again all his 
 rich store of melodies to cheer his mate in her long 
 and patient vigil, has time for music no longer. 
 
 Hard indeed must the pair toil to keep their insati- 
 able nestlings supplied with food. From dawn to 
 dark it is one continuous labour. 
 
 And when the hush of night has settled down upon 
 the woodlands ; when the glow has faded from the 
 west, and soft blue shadows gather in the landscape, 
 the little minstrels are fain to snatch a few brief hours 
 of sleep before the glimmer in the east shall rouse once 
 more their hungry brood. 
 
 In the early spring, commencing even before the 
 grip of winter is fairly loosened from the land, the song- 
 thrush is the chief musician. Not half-hearted and 
 fickle, like the nightingale ; not given to breaking off 
 in the middle of a bar, like the blackcap ; but, from the 
 top of a wayside elm, or from the shelter of a spreading
 
 140 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 beech-tree, he will pour his wonderful music by the 
 hour together a soft, delicious, perfect piece of 
 melody. 
 
 He has tuneful kinsmen, too. Who does not love 
 to listen to the blackbird's few mellow bars in the 
 evening twilight? He has a critical taste for straw- 
 berries, to be sure, and he is a parlous fellow to be left 
 alone in a cherry-tree ; but he is a noble minstrel, and 
 he earns his wages. 
 
 The wild song of the missel-thrush again is a wel- 
 come addition to the orchestra ; and the flyfisher, who 
 is wise enough to see in him a friend, and not a foe, 
 would be loath to lose, from lonely streams, the 
 company and the melody of the sprightly dipper. 
 
 The nightingale, at his best, is a superb and peerless 
 minstrel. But the songster of the Surrey lanes and 
 the pleasant Hertfordshire woodlands might be of 
 another race altogether from his brother in the west. 
 In the combes that nestle among the broken ramparts 
 of the Mendips, the nightingale is usually but a 
 capricious and feeble performer. There is not the 
 keen rivalry which in the home counties brings the 
 finest singers to the front. He is on the Marches of 
 his dominions too, and perhaps he feels himself a 
 stranger, and his heart is otherwhere. 
 
 But if the nightingale has no peer, he has some 
 musical companions, who, for the most part, have gone 
 with him now in the track of the summer. 
 
 Listen on the edge of some quiet coppice when the
 
 Sylvan Minstrels. 141 
 
 hawthorn is out. From the cool depths of a tangled 
 thicket comes a soft and flute like song tender and 
 sweet, and full of melody it is 
 
 The blackcap's breezy strain ; 
 That airily floats, in liquid notes, 
 Through the shafts of the leafy dome, 
 Where, deftly laid in the woodbine-shade, 
 Is swinging his fairy home. 
 
 And, through the hedgerow near him, filters the 
 hurried song of the white-throat. Now, he flickers a 
 few feet into the air, singing all the while. Now, he 
 balances on a spray, -swelling his little throat with 
 music until it seems positively to glow. Now, he dis- 
 appears in the hedge, and croons a quiet melody to 
 himself so softly that you fancy him in the next field, 
 until, disturbed by the approach of footsteps, he 
 dashes from cover, with angry notes of alarm and in- 
 dignation. 
 
 Hard by, a sober hedge-sparrow sings his modest 
 lay. He stays with us all the year. He never grows 
 discontented with the cold, or the shortness of pro- 
 visions. He is deliberate in his ditty, as a steady stay- 
 at-home might be expected to be. His is a simple 
 strain ; there are no variations in it ; but we accept it 
 thankfully, remembering the constancy of the singer. 
 
 The skylark too, a prince of song, spreads his 
 quivering wings not only over the rich May meadows, 
 but a sunny day even in October will tempt him up 
 towards the blue heaven, in such an ecstasy, that the
 
 142 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 footsore wanderer on the dusty highway pauses and 
 turns to listen to a strain, which carries his thoughts 
 back, perchance, to his own brighter days among green 
 fields and pleasant lanes ; and when at length he turns 
 back to the reality of his dreary tramp, he may even 
 hum a stave of some long-forgotten ballad about the 
 flowers, and the birds, and the spring-time. 
 
 The voices of birds which have no gift of song may 
 be heard the whole year through. Such are the 
 Corvidff the crows. 
 
 The whole race, from the raven to the chough, have 
 voices harsh, monotonous, unmusical ; and their 
 gorgeous relatives in the far East, the birds of Paradise, 
 are no better off. When Dr. Johnson, in ' The Story 
 of a Day,' relates how the ears of Obidah, the son of 
 Abensina, were delighted as he ' pursued his journey 
 through the plains of Hindostan,' by c the morning 
 song of the bird of Paradise,' the statement is open to 
 much the same kind of criticism as that which Cuvier 
 is said to have bestowed on the Academicians' defini- 
 tion of a crab ; for the bird is not found in India ; and 
 its morning song, as described by Mr. Wallace, is 
 ' waivk, wawk, wowk ; wok, wok, wok.' 
 
 There is not much in the woodlands of ' the wood- 
 pecker tapping the hollow beech-tree.' The familiar 
 green species finds his food chiefly on the ground 
 but his voice is often heard a merry voice enough 
 a reveller's laugh, in spite of Buffon's idea that wood- 
 peckers are a melancholy race.
 
 Sylvan Minstrels. 143 
 
 They are common in many places, but are no more 
 to be seen by the careless observer than the Dryads 
 themselves. At the sound of footsteps they will shrink 
 behind sheltering branches or climb high up into their 
 leafy citadels ; and it is only the quiet, patient watcher 
 who does much more than catch a passing glimpse of 
 the gay green livery and the gallant crimson crest. 
 
 There are many other birds which, although not 
 endowed with song, help to cheer the woodland ways 
 with merry throats. 
 
 The year will have barely opened ere the great tit- 
 mouse and his genial friends will raise their ringing call- 
 notes in every lane and wood and orchard, clear and 
 musical in the sharp January air, like the clink of iron 
 upon the village anvil. 
 
 There is music in the fierce cry of the kestrel as his 
 keen wings bear him up to his fastness in the rocks ; 
 in the joyous screaming of a troop of swifts as they 
 revel in their empire of the air ; in the very drone of 
 the nightjar, sailing over the meadows in the dusk to 
 pick up a moth for his supper ; and in the solemn 
 stillness of a moonlight night, there is music in ' the 
 lonely owl's halloo.'
 
 WINTER VISITORS. 
 
 A L THOUGH no longer on our coasts descend the 
 keels of the Norsemen, and although sea rovers 
 are as rare as the sea-serpent, yet each autumn there 
 comes on us still from the hungry North a host of 
 clamorous invaders. The wide stretches of level land 
 along the shores of rivers, the muddy flats left by the 
 retreating tide, are peopled anew by the wild fowl that 
 deserted them in the spring. From Norwegian fjelds 
 and forests, from the wide plains of Siberia, even 
 from near the Pole itself, great flights of these winter 
 visitors are trooping fast. Once more the snow lies 
 deep upon the marshes that in the brief summer of 
 the North awoke and kindled into life, and glowed 
 with rich rank verdure. Once more over the desolate 
 wastes there reigns the silence of the dreary winter. 
 
 Along the Eastern coasts we may watch at early 
 dawn, high up on the grey sky, the long columns of 
 the invading army. 
 
 Flocks of geese in the orderly grey wedges that 
 delight the heart of the wild-fowler ; strings of teal
 
 Winter Visitors. 145 
 
 and widgeon ; companies even of the great whooping 
 swan, whose mighty pinions sound so strangely as 
 they pass by night ; vast crowds of snipe, greenshanks, 
 dotterels, plovers perhaps even a few phalarope, are 
 borne along with the waves of the great inroad. 
 
 From our own moorlands, as well as from remoter 
 breeding stations, comes down the curlew, at the 
 sound of whose plaintive cry you will put in a wire 
 cartridge, and lie down in your boat. 
 
 Armies of ducks, frozen out of their Arctic feeding 
 grounds, settle down on the brown waters of broad 
 river mouths. 
 
 On every muddy shore flocks of sandpipers, re- 
 turned from their haunts by the Polar Sea, gather into 
 clouds that sail up and down the wintry beach with 
 musical and mournful cries. 
 
 Now they stand out a myriad points of silver on the 
 cold grey heaven ; now they are lost again as they 
 wheel with the precision of a troop of cavalry; now 
 'they pour along like a fire that sweeps the whole 
 earth before it ;' now they settle down on the shore 
 and run this way and that probing the mud with their 
 long bills in search of food, and leaving mazes of light 
 footprints on the yielding surface. 
 
 Flights of woodcocks, suddenly descending like a 
 waterspout from their airy highway, alight spent and 
 breathless on the land. Then scattering over the 
 country they return to their haunts of the previous 
 autumn. 
 
 10
 
 146 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 Woodcocks, like many other birds which seem to 
 belong more to the winter than the summer, breed in 
 our islands to a limited extent, but this fixed popula- 
 tion is always largely recruited by a great influx of 
 strangers. 
 
 Not only is the coast thus taken possession of. 
 There is not a country parish in which troops of field- 
 fares are not quartered for the winter ; which is not 
 visited by flights of redwings. While in more secluded 
 districts the woodcock and the snipe are lying ; per- 
 haps a hawfinch or two, or little company of siskins, 
 may settle down, while the resident population even 
 of goldcrests is augmented by additions from beyond 
 the sea. 
 
 A much rarer autumn guest than these is the cross- 
 bill, a bird which is not often seen in sufficient 
 numbers to attract attention ; but there are quaint 
 allusions in the old writers to its appearance in these 
 islands in vast flights, when the damage done by it in 
 the apple-orchards proved its seemingly malformed 
 beak to be a very serviceable weapon indeed. 
 
 Siskins again are somewhat irregular in their visits. 
 They appear in numbers one winter, and then years 
 may elapse before they are seen again in the same 
 district. 
 
 The haunt of the siskin is among the alder-trees 
 that fringe some quiet stream far from sight or sound 
 of man. As you draw near no birds are visible ; 
 everything is still and silent, but before you reach the
 
 Winter Visitors. 147 
 
 trees a little troop of siskins fly up from the alder- 
 seeds that lie scattered on the ground, with strange 
 metallic notes, and alight among the trees farther 
 down the stream. 
 
 Give them a few minutes to settle down again, and 
 then steal along in the shelter of the old willow, whose 
 rifted trunk leans over the water. There they are, the 
 whole tribe of them, busy among the catkins, clinging 
 in ever-changfng graceful attitudes to the brown 
 clusters that hang among the swaying boughs. 
 
 It is well for them that they have found a sanctuary 
 like this. Too often, alas ! our feathered visitors meet 
 their death within our borders. We show no favour 
 to the oriole ; we give no shelter to the waxwing. 
 
 And as long as there are those who think that the 
 possession of the stuffed and mounted skin is more to 
 be desired than the delight of watching the living bird 
 in the enjoyment of its freedom, and write with pride 
 to the papers of their ' success in bagging ' a whole 
 flock of rare visitors, there is small hope that the 
 bustard will once more run free on Salisbury Plain, of 
 that the crane will come back to his long-deserted 
 haunt among the fens. 
 
 To the true lover of Nature the pleasure lies, 
 not in promptly slaying each new and too trustful 
 feathered stranger, but in watching the manners and 
 customs of the children of the air. 
 
 He is willing to lie quiet in the shelter of some 
 friendly screen of leafage, while the wary coal-tit carries
 
 148 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 into her own particular chink those materials out of 
 which she and her mate will frame their soft and cosy 
 habitation. 
 
 He will face the wet grass of a late June morning, 
 and lie hidden in a ditch to watch the kestrel take her 
 plunder to her fierce brood high up in the limestone 
 cliff. 
 
 For him the woodland ways are full of ever new 
 delight. Each hedgerow has its feathered tenants ; 
 each ancient tree is the haunt of one or other of his 
 gentle vassals.
 
 ADAPTED PLUMAGE. 
 
 *T*HE cold hand of Winter not only cuts down the 
 late lingering flowers, and scatters the few last 
 leaves upon the woodland path, but leaves the white 
 print of icy fingers on the very plumage of the birds. 
 
 The feathers of some, such as the snow-bunting, he 
 touches lightly here and there as with a few flakes of 
 early snow. Others, like the ptarmigan, whose sober 
 colouring has all through the summer matched so well 
 the browns and greys of the heather, and the lichen 
 of her home among the mountains, he clothes with a 
 dress as white as the very snowdrift which enwraps her 
 winter home.
 
 150 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 The ptarmigan is with us a Highland bird, not 
 being found in England at all. In other countries, 
 where not strictly Arctic in its range, it frequents 
 mountainous districts, generally at a great height above 
 sea-level. 
 
 The white birds so conspicuous in our winter 
 markets are chiefly willow grouse. They are larger 
 than ptarmigan, and are without the black stripe which 
 crosses the eye of that bird. 
 
 Although there are but few species whose garb is 
 thus completely altered in the winter season, there are 
 many in whose plumage a marked change takes place, 
 generally in the direction of more sombre tones and 
 less conspicuous colouring. The linnet, for example, 
 loses the vivid touch of crimson from his glossy crown ; 
 the flush of carmine from his delicate breast. And 
 the twittering companies which fly over the winter 
 stubble are dull indeed compared with their appear- 
 ance early in the year, when the rival songsters, each 
 on the top of his favourite fyrze bush, fill the air with 
 sweet snatches of most ethereal song. 
 
 It is, indeed, in the spring, in the pairing-time, that 
 birds are at their best and brightest : 
 
 ' In the spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast, 
 In the spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest.' 
 
 When the broods have flown begins the annual 
 moult, often accompanied by some change in appear- 
 ance.
 
 Adapted Plumage. 151 
 
 There is also towards winter a thickening of the 
 feathers as a defence against the cold. 
 
 A series of careful observations, made under the 
 idea that one cause of migration might be that some 
 birds possessed warmer blood than others, seemed 
 merely to show that birds of powerful flight have a 
 higher blood-heat than less active species. The swift, 
 for example, measured no less than 107 deg. F. ; but 
 that was no more than could be said of the green 
 woodpecker. 
 
 At the approach of winter the oyster-catcher plain 
 enough to be seen at all times with his black and 
 white dress and his bright red beak, as he wanders 
 over the beach at low water, making himself still 
 plainer by his strange cry gets himself a white band 
 across his dusky breast. 
 
 Several of the plovers and sandpipers lose their 
 dark and conspicuous markings. The phalarope, 
 whose summer attire is faced with red, comes to our 
 shores in a delicate suit of white and grey. All these 
 and many other changes, seen at their extreme in the 
 ptarmigan, are no doubt meant as aids to concealment 
 n a bare and wintry landscape. 
 
 The plumage of birds in general, especially of tho?o 
 which make their nests on the ground, will be found 
 to harmonize to a great extent with their usual sur- 
 roundings. The dress of the snipe, for instance, 
 clouded as it is with shades of brown and streaked 
 with markings like a few casual blades of withered
 
 152 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 sedge, is most happily assimilated to its haunts among 
 the dry grass of windy moors, and the rustling flags on 
 the fringe of quiet pools. 
 
 It was well said by Bewick that at a little distance 
 the woodcock appears ' exactly like the withered stalks 
 and leaves of ferns, sticks, moss, and grasses which 
 form the background of the scenery by which it is 
 sheltered in its moist and solitary retreats.' 
 
 Another bird of particularly quiet and inconspicuous 
 plumage is the nightjar. A shy and retiring visitor, a 
 very late arrival from the south, she goes far afield to 
 find a place where she may bring up her small family 
 without fear of interruption ; and when she lies close 
 among the stones of the hillside, or the dry grass of 
 the upland pasture, screened by tall clumps of 
 bracken, she is hardly distinguishable from the 
 ground. 
 
 It is a red-letter day in the life of the young naturalist 
 when for the first time he flushes a nightjar from her 
 eggs. Without a sound to betray her flight, she glides 
 away with apparent difficulty, and settles on a neigh- 
 bouring tree, whence, perched along instead of across 
 the bough, she watches the proceedings of the intruder. 
 Should he fallow her, fancying her to be lame or 
 unable to fly far, she will lure him on like a lapwing. 
 But if he has kept his eyes on the spot she rose from 
 he may be fortunate enough to find, at his feet, laid 
 on the bare ground without a feather or a straw by 
 way of nest, those two exquisite eggs, like white
 
 Adapted Plumage. 153 
 
 marble veined with soft shades of grey, which will 
 rank among the fairest prizes in his cabinet. 
 
 The colours of the lapwing are not much of a pro- 
 tection to her, but her eggs are often hard to find on 
 the burnt grass with which they harmonize so well. 
 All around are the brown stretches of the moor or, 
 perhaps, the breezy level of the old Roman encamp- 
 ment. High overheard, against the blue April sky, 
 sail the ' wanton ' lapwings, on broad and whistling 
 pinions. Now they turn over and over in the air, 
 now they sweep down close at hand, now they alight 
 at a distance and make believe to be visiting their 
 eggs. Now they fly round with shrill cries of lament 
 and protestation, louder and more vehement as the 
 steps of the intruder approach the longed-for spoil. 
 Finally, they accompany him off the ground exulting 
 in his defeat and their escape from plunder. 
 
 The comparatively sober colour of hen birds in 
 general is no doubt to protect them from observation 
 while sitting on their eggs. The cock bird always 
 takes care of himself. Who has ever known the glossy 
 mallard or the handsome eider stand by his wife and 
 family at the approach of danger ? He is off at once, 
 while the staid and sombre duck, full of anxiety, does 
 her best to hurry her brood into a place of safety. 
 
 Just as decorative plumage pure and simple reaches 
 its highest pitch in the adornment of the Birds of 
 Paradise, so the extreme of contrast is here presented 
 between the male and the female.
 
 154 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 It is not twenty-five years since Mr. Wallace's two 
 magnificent specimens of the Emerald Bird of Paradise 
 delighted the eyes of visitors to the Zoological Gardens. 
 Most of us have to be content with the skins alone ; 
 and even then, dried and distorted as the finest speci- 
 mens must always be, few objects in nature will bear 
 comparison with their marvellous beauty. The soft 
 and delicate tones of the colouring the emerald 
 throat, the yellow crown, the rich brown of the wings 
 and tail, the wonder of the flowing plumes which fall 
 round the living bird like a shower of gold all these 
 render the Great and the Lesser Birds of Paradise 
 two of the finest gems in the vast treasure-house of 
 Nature. This description applies to the male alone ; 
 his wife is of a plain and sober brown uniform 
 enough to satisfy the soul of the primmest Quakeress 
 of the ancient school. 
 
 Birds which lay their eggs in holes are less exposed 
 to danger, and the difference between male and female, 
 if it exist at all, is much less strongly marked. 
 
 The green woodpecker is a case in point. He is a 
 handsome bird. Although the bright colour of his 
 forester's dress harmonizes very well with the tone ot 
 his haunt among the orchards, and although his 
 solitary ways keep him mostly out of sight, yet once 
 observed, his crimson crest and yellow tail-coverts 
 catch the eye in a moment. And his wife, except for 
 an extra patch of red on his cheek, is as gay as he. 
 She and her brood, however, in their hollowed home
 
 Adapted Plumage. 155 
 
 deep in the heart of a tree, are safe from the keen eye 
 of prowling weasel or marauding hawk, and need no 
 protection from subdued colouring. 
 
 The kingfisher, another hole-breeder, is more bril- 
 liant still ; and here again the hen bird vies with her 
 mate in the brightness of her colours. Under a glass 
 case, perched stiffly on a twig in what the bird-stuffer 
 regards as a natural attitude, he is rather an ungainly 
 object. 
 
 But in his haunt by the sylvan stream he is the eye 
 of the picture the finishing touch to the landscape. 
 
 The little river wanders through rich meadows .that 
 in summer are bright with purple spikes of loose-strife, 
 and the golden wings of the flower de luce. There is 
 a devious footpath over rustic bridges, but wayfarers 
 are few and far between. Dark alders lean over the 
 banks ; forests of tall sedges cluster lovingly round 
 the roots of the grey willow trees. There is no sound 
 but the drone of the old Norman mill and the plash 
 of water over the ancient wheel ; or now and then the 
 cry of a creeper in the great sycamore, or the leap of 
 a trout, or the plunge of a water-rat. It is a place 
 
 Where timid rail and moorhen hide 
 
 In the tufted sedge by the riverside ; 
 
 Where dusky coots, with careless oar, 
 
 The silver pools drift idly o'er ; 
 
 Where the grey heron looks silent down 
 
 On the trout that flash through the shadows brown ; 
 
 Where fiery marsh-flowers stoop to lave 
 
 Their golden bells in the whirling wave.
 
 156 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 Suddenly, from his unseen station a flash of blue 
 light along the brown water darts a kingfisher. 
 Down he goes ; there is a gleam of red and azure 
 among the silver of the scattered spray ; then, with a 
 minnow glittering in his beak, he goes back to his 
 perch on the low bough hanging over the water, to 
 beat the life out of his prey before swallowing it. Or 
 maybe he carries it off to the steep bank below the 
 weir, where, half hidden by ferns and trailing ivy, and 
 screened by the great elms which join hands across 
 the stream, his expectant brood, standing up like 
 storks at the mouth of their hole, scream a chorus of 
 impatience and delight at the appearance of dinner.
 
 OUTLAWS. 
 
 Spif -, HE reader of history, 
 while regarding with 
 a doubtful eye the exploits of 
 heroes like Robin Hood and 
 his bold companions, would 
 yet be loath to lose these pic- 
 turesque traditions, these vivid 
 touches of colour scattered all 
 
 too sparingly in the staid and sober chronicle. 
 With similar feelings the naturalist contemplates 
 those outlawed clans of birds and beasts which 
 are viewed askance by the world at large, which the 
 farmer shoots without trial, and the keeper hangs up
 
 158 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 without hope of reprieve. He knows how he would 
 miss from the landscape the bold colouring of the 
 magpie, the bright plumage of the jay, the marvellous 
 poise of the kestrel ; and knowing that, in spite of all 
 that may be said to their discredit, their virtues are 
 much greater than their vices that some are quite 
 innocent, and that even the crow is not so black as he 
 is painted he, at least, would let the hawk go by and 
 spare even the magpie from its doom. 
 
 It is true that the teaching of the village school and 
 even the machinery of the common law have done 
 much in their defence, but there are still whole races 
 the birds of prey, for instance which are more or 
 less under the ban. 
 
 The keeper is for the most part beyond the reach 
 of softening influences. There rot upon his gallows 
 the remains not only of the sparrow-hawk and the 
 magpie, the owl and the kestrel, but even of the 
 woodpecker and the nightjar birds capable of doing 
 rather less harm to the game than the Babes in the 
 Wood. 
 
 The royal eagle is indeed no longer ruthlessly shot 
 or trapped wherever he may appear ; in some of the 
 deer forests protection is even afforded him. But to 
 the buzzard and the peregrine no such mercy is 
 shown; and those which are not slaughtered in the 
 supposed interests of game-preserving, become the 
 prey of the dealer and the collector. The latter has 
 much to answer for. Although rewards are no longer
 
 Outlaws. 159 
 
 offered by rural vestries for the heads of kites and 
 crows, the price that the collector cheerfully pays for 
 a good specimen a price which might make the 
 worthy churchwardens turn in their graves, is an even 
 stronger inducement to bring down every strange bird 
 that may appear in the parish. The kite, once com- 
 mon in the very streets of London, is now so rare that 
 we have but little chance of studying its habits at all 
 in this country. 
 
 The buzzard happily still survives among the Welsh 
 mountains and in similar districts. On parts of Dart- 
 moor it is quite a feature in the landscape, when sail- 
 ing slowly in wide circles on its broad and stately 
 wings it calls now and then to its mate with a strange 
 cry which is audible when the bird itself is almost lost 
 in the blue. 
 
 Mice and beetles are probably its chief food fcr 
 most of the year, though its requirements are greater 
 when it has young to provide for. A buzzard seen to 
 alight on a hillside in Wales rose into the air with a 
 long snake writhing in its grasp. 
 
 The noble peregrine, although no longer finding 
 shelter as it once did in the towers of Westminster 
 Abbey, lingers in many places on our coasts. Making 
 its home in the steep face of some sea-beaten cliff, it 
 rears its brood in defiance of the boldest climber ; 
 and, sallying forth from its rocky fastness, it will 
 flutter with terrible effect the pigeons of the farmer's 
 dovecote ; while the partridge and the teal have small
 
 160 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 hope of escape from the rush of its untiring wings, and 
 the fatal stroke of its resistless talons. 
 
 The commonest of the race, the kestrel, far from 
 being a foe to the farmer or the keeper, is a staunch 
 ally. No poacher is he ; no harrier of hen-coops ; 
 even the lark and the linnet may for the most part go 
 free for hitn. His game is usually nothing more 
 mbitious than moles or field-mice ; while the chafer 
 and the dor-beetle furnish perhaps even the greater 
 part of his diet. 
 
 The kestrel will often take possession of the 
 abandoned nest of a crow, but is fond, when he can 
 get it, of a fortress in the rocks. 
 
 In a niche high up in the cliff, half hidden perhaps 
 by ancient whitebeam and rowans, which cling with 
 roots like talons to the battered crags, and fringed 
 with the grey-green tongues of limestone-loving ferns, 
 the rich brown eggs, the coveted spoil of the young 
 collector, are laid and hatched with no more nest than 
 the earth which decayed leaves or w'nter storms have 
 strewn lightly over the stony surface. 
 
 From such an eyrie the keen-eyed hawk looks far 
 out over the landscape. Sweeping down upon the 
 lowlands with a few beats of his strong wings, he 
 lingers a moment perhaps in the dark fir-trees in the 
 lane below, then drifts leisurely down the valley on his 
 morning raid. Now he poises in mid air. His wings 
 spread wide and motionless to catch the breeze, or 
 rapidly vibrating in the still ether ; his broad tail
 
 Outlaws. 161 
 
 expanded to the full, the sunlight glowing on his chest- 
 nut back. Suddenly closing his pinions, he falls like 
 a stone. 
 
 Rising again, he continues his foray, hovering here 
 and there over coppice and meadow, stooping down at 
 times upon his hapless quarry, and at last bearing his 
 booty up to his fierce eyasses in the cliff. 
 
 All a-row upon the threshold stand the bold young 
 brood, and await with eager screams their sire's 
 return. 
 
 Scale the rocks and visit the eyrie. The old bird 
 floats overhead with" wild outcries of defiance. The 
 undaunted brood ruffle up their feathers, throw them- 
 selves on their backs in the farthest corner of their 
 cave and make a brave show of fight with beak and 
 claws. Before them lies the untouched repast a 
 mole. Scattered under the nest are innumerable 
 pellets the undigested remains of many banquets, 
 consisting mainly of the fur of small animals, and 
 glittering with the elytra of carabi and dor-beetles ; 
 traces of feathers few or none. 
 
 The sparrow-hawk is a bird of quite another way of 
 living. His method of hunting is less picturesque, 
 perhaps ; his quarry is more ambitious. He skims 
 swiftly over the fields, and just clearing the hedge, 
 pounces on the unexpectant finch or bunting who is 
 pluming himself on the other side. He has a way of 
 suddenly appearing in a farmyard and snatching up a 
 stray chicken. Even a ringdove is not too large for 
 
 1.1
 
 162 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 him, and he will overtake a partridge in the open 
 field. No bird, indeed, is safe a few bright feathers 
 scattered by some lonely path mark the fate even of 
 the jay and the green woodpecker. 
 
 The sparrowhawk will sometimes attack a crow. 
 The duel is fought in mid-air. The hawk skilfully 
 wheeling about his sable antagonist makes now and 
 then frantic clutches at his back ; the lumbering crow, 
 with hoarse notes of anger and defiance, does his 
 best to meet his active enemy on the point of the 
 bayonet. And so they drift over the crest of the hill 
 and disappear. 
 
 Both birds have a bad character. Have they been 
 quarrelling over the division of plunder, or has the 
 extremity of hunger driven the hawk to attack a bird 
 larger than himself? 
 
 He is, in truth, a bold marauder. Instances have 
 been known of his dashing through a window in chase 
 of a lark or sparrow that had taken sanctuary from its 
 fierce pursuer even within the dwelling of man. One 
 was caught in a drawing-room in the act of dragging a 
 canary through the bars of its cage. 
 
 Few rustics when armed with a gun will let an owl 
 of any sort go by scot-free. They shake their heads 
 when told that they are killing a useful destroyer of 
 vermin. 
 
 ' Men have no faith in fine-spun sentiment 
 Who put their trust in bullorks and in beeves.' 
 
 Some years since a row of stately elms was the
 
 Outlaws. 163 
 
 pride of a West-country village. They might have been 
 saplings when Monmouth marched his men through 
 the parish on the way to Sedgemoor. They were 
 known in all the district as ' the place where the great 
 white owl do bide.' In an evil hour the owner, with 
 an eye to filling his pocket, had the trees cut down. 
 Within the hollow trunk of that particular elin which 
 had been the home of the owls was a heap of bones 
 and fur the long accumulated relics of many a moon- 
 light foray. Careful search among these remains 
 brought to light some half-dozen skulls of small birds 
 amid a very charnel-house of crania of mice and moles. 
 
 Another band of outlaws with characters worse even 
 than those of the birds of prey are the crow and his 
 dark companions. 
 
 They are all of great use at times, but their lives are 
 mostly stained with rapine and murder. 
 
 There is something weird and gloomy about the 
 king of the race the raven. It is hard not to read in 
 his dismal croak an omen of evil. His iron bill is a 
 terrible instrument of destruction to lambs in outlying 
 pastures of Exmoor ; and woe betide the unhappy 
 beast that, worn out with age and hardship, sinks 
 down exhausted on the open moorland. In this case, 
 however, superstition is a powerful factor in his preser- 
 vation. 
 
 The countryman of the Mendips, where the sable 
 bird is still sometimes seen, willing enough to risk his 
 neck iii plundering the cliff-built nest of hawk or rock
 
 164 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 dove, will not touch the eyrie of the raven. Stories 
 are even now told, with bated breath, of the fate which 
 befell men, still remembered in the village, who had 
 dared to rob the nest or shoot the birds. 
 
 The services of the rook are now generally recog- 
 nised. His hands are not altogether clean in the 
 matter of newly-sown grain or potatoes, but he is an 
 angel of light by the side of his cousin the crow, who, 
 according to the popular account, only takes to killing 
 grabs when eggs are scarce and it is not the season 
 for chickens. 
 
 But the magpie is the Ishmaelite of the race. If 
 his hand is not against every man, every man's hand 
 is certainly against him. He knows it well. He 
 builds himself a mighty fortress in the top of some 
 tall fir tree, or in the heart of an ancient blackthorn, 
 and he bars the approaches with outworks of thorns 
 jmd sticks until the whole tree bristles like a hedgehog. 
 He is a bold and barefaced bandit, of whose ill-deeds 
 most raisers of poultry have to complain. 
 
 The jay, however, is not far behind in evil reputa- 
 tion, both in the farmyard and the cover. He is 
 a handsome bird ; indeed, we have few to match him ; 
 and that is no doubt another reason why he is so 
 seldom spared. Now that the fashion seems to have 
 been firmly set against the wearing of wings and 
 feathers that long-lingering relic of barbaric adorn- 
 ment the poor jay may have more chance in the 
 struggle for existence.
 
 Outlaws. 165 
 
 Bad as is the character of the corvidce, there can be 
 little doubt that their services in destroying mice, 
 grubs, and beetles, for more than half the year at 
 least, far outweigh the harm they do. 
 
 ' Even the blackest of them all, the crow, 
 Renders good service as your man-at-arms, 
 Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail, 
 And crying havoc on the slug and snail.' 
 
 But they have, one and all of them, a black mark 
 set down against their names in the memory of the 
 farmer. The magpie is shot for plundering the hen- 
 roost; the jay pays with his life the penalty of his 
 taste for peas ; the crow dies without mercy as the foe 
 of leverets and weakly lambs ; even the rook is 
 suspended in terrorem over the corn he laboured so 
 hard to save ; while the jackdaw, convicted of nothing 
 particular, gets his death as an aider and abettor of 
 his inky relations.
 
 SOME BIRD MYTHS. 
 
 "THE first keen touch of winter leads to our doors 
 the fearless and familiar robin. His appearance 
 is so consonant with our ideas of Christmas that we 
 regard him as a natural feature in the leafless landscape 
 a sort of recognised property in the winter scenery 
 of poet and of painter. We think of him too as a 
 bold-hearted bird, who will face the cold blast and the 
 bitter snowfall ; a faithful vassal who stands by us 
 when less constant friends depart. This part of his 
 character, it must be confessed, is somewhat over- 
 drawn ; for he too is a migrant and a rover after all. 
 
 As the cold grows sharper and the food supply con- 
 sequently shorter, crowds of redbreasts cross the sea, 
 and some of them probably go as far even as the oases 
 of the great Sahara. Those individuals, who, from 
 previous experience, rely on the provision made for 
 them on friendly doorsteps and window-sills may stay 
 with us ; and many interesting instances are recorded 
 of 'redbreasts who have boldly quartered themselves 
 for the winter in dwelling-houses, and have even taken 
 their meals with the family.
 
 Some Bird Myths. 167 
 
 For those who thus remain there is in the popular 
 mind an idea of sacredness which protects them, not 
 only from the rustic fowling-piece, but mostly even 
 from the stone that startles the house-sparrow into 
 voluble profanity. 
 
 The reason for this protection and encouragement 
 is obvious. Old myths and half-forgotten legends are 
 indeed quoted to account for it ; but these are rather 
 to be considered as a result than as a cause. It seems 
 much more probable that the robin's claim to indul- 
 gence lies rather in the attraction of its pretty and 
 confiding ways. Its 'sprightly bearing, its red breast, 
 its bright black eye, its confident air, and the knowing 
 turn of its head win for it more favour than any ancient 
 myth or mouldering tradition. 
 
 Nor is it likely that any belief, conscious or other- 
 wise, in the story of the ' Babes in the Wood,' in- 
 fluences the English peasant in his dealings with the 
 robin. That famous ballad appeared, according to 
 Percy, in the first year of the seventeenth century ; 
 but a similar idea is found in the ' Cornucopia,' a 
 work of some years earlier, where it is stated as a 
 well-known fact that the redbreast was in the habit of 
 covering with moss the bodies of the dead. Again, 
 Webster writes, in 1638 : 
 
 ' Call for the robin redbreast and the wren ; 
 Since o'er shady groves they hover, 
 And with leaves and flowers do cover 
 The friendless bodies of unburied men.
 
 168 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 Two distinct legends account for the colour of its 
 breast. One is associated with Christ's Crown of 
 Thorns. Another story is that the robin scorched its 
 breast in bringing fire down from heaven to rekindle 
 the cold hearths of mankind. One legend, embodied 
 in Whittier's beautiful verses, tells us that the robin 
 burnt its tender little bosom while carrying drops of 
 water in its beak to relieve the anguish of the souls of 
 the lost. 
 
 It is said that the wren, associated in myth and 
 rhyme with the robin, is still in some places looked 
 upon as its mate. The reason for this strange idea 
 lies perhaps in the similar friendly way of the two 
 birds. Both constantly haunt the abodes of man. 
 The songs of both, from wintry dawn to sunset, enliven 
 the dark days when no other minstrel finds a stave to 
 sing. Their easily recognised figures are familiar to 
 us from childhood ; their very names are household 
 words. 
 
 Some writers as early as Aristotle describe the 
 wren as the king of birds, and various accounts are 
 found in folk-lore of the contest which gave him this 
 dignity. 
 
 The feathered tribes, assembled in solemn conclave 
 to elect a king, agreed to honour as their lord, that 
 one of their number who should fly the highest. The 
 eagle easily distanced all comers, and when even his 
 great wings were weary, and he could fly no higher, 
 he prepared to claim the crown. Thereupon a wren,
 
 Some Bird Myths. 169 
 
 which had hidden itself away among the feathers of 
 its mighty rival, left its retreat and soared a few feet 
 further into the air, and by this trick obtained the 
 royal title. 
 
 It is doubtful, however, whether the common brown 
 bird is meant, or the gold-crest the smallest of 
 British, and, indeed, of European birds, which wears 
 a visible symbol of sovereignty a dash of gold upon 
 its tiny head. 
 
 A curious custom once prevailed in parts of France 
 and in several places in the British islands, and is said 
 to be not yet entirely extinct, by which wrens were 
 hunted every year on Christmas Day, and, on the day 
 following, the lifeless bodies of the little birds were 
 carried through the streets in solemn procession by 
 boys, who went from house to house asking for money 
 and singing : 
 
 ' The wren, the wren, the king of all birds, 
 St. Stephen's Day was caught in the furze ; 
 We hunted him up, we hunted him down, 
 We hunted him all about the town. 
 Although he is little, his family great, 
 I pray you, good people, give us a treat ' 
 
 with other verses varying in number and substance 
 in different districts. It is said in explanation of this 
 custom that a wren flying in the face of St. Stephen's 
 gaoler awoke him as the protomartyr was in the act of 
 escaping. 
 
 The wren probably gets no credit from the Catholic
 
 170 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 population, from the story that the sleeping sentries of 
 King William's army were roused, and the Orange 
 army saved from destruction, by the noise which a 
 party of these little birds made in pecking crumbs 
 from a Protestant drum-head. 
 
 Like the robin, the wren is said to have injured 
 itself in a public spirited attempt to bring fire from 
 heaven. Its feathers having been all burnt off, the 
 other birds lent it some of theirs, with the single ex- 
 ception of the owl, who for its selfish and ungrateful 
 conduct was banished from society, and has ever since 
 been obliged to wait till nightfall before he can stir 
 abroad. 
 
 Owls have never been popular birds. The gloomy 
 and retiring habits of most species, and the blood- 
 curdling screech of some of them, have earned for the 
 whole tribe an evil reputation. We read in Pliny that, 
 on two occasions, a large owl having made its appear- 
 ance in the streets of Rome, a solemn ceremony was 
 performed by the whole city to avert the catastrophe 
 foreshadowed by visits from such awful - looking 
 monsters. 
 
 Not a few bird-myths are connected with death or 
 ill-fortune. Even in this matter-of-fact age there are 
 probably many places where all hope of a sick man's 
 recovery would be given up if a crow, or even a rook 
 or a jackdaw, flew over the dwelling. In the Orkneys 
 the same belief attaches to the ring-ouzel, and there 
 are districts in England where the sudden appearance
 
 Some Bird Myths. 171 
 
 of a white pigeon is thought to herald the approach of 
 death. 
 
 There are not a few even of educated persons who, 
 mindful of the old rhymes, would feel more relieved 
 on seeing a second magpie cross their path. The 
 couplet : 
 
 ' One for sorrow, two for mirth, 
 Three for a wedding, four for a birth,' 
 
 is familiar to all ; but a variety of consequences is 
 predicted from seeing five or six, and one version even 
 goes up to ten : 
 
 ' Five for silver, six for gold, 
 Seven for a secret not to be told, 
 Eight for heaven, nine for hell, 
 And ten for the devil's ain sell.' 
 
 In other days at least, and perhaps the belief may still 
 linger here and there, the storm-tossed sailor felt hope 
 die out within him as he watched, flitting among the 
 white wave-crests of the angry sea, the dark figure of 
 the stormy petrel. For he saw in this little bird 
 which takes its name from Peter's attempt to walk on 
 the water a phantom from the nether world. Ac- 
 cording to one legend, it was the restless ghost of 
 some dead-and-gone sea-captain, condemned for his 
 cruelty to wander thus for ever, like Vanderdecken, 
 over the waste of waters; or, more ominous still, the 
 soul of a d owned mariner wailing over his unconse- 
 crated grave. 
 
 In the ' Metamorphoses ' we are familiar with many
 
 172 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 instances in which mortals were, according to the poet, 
 transformed into birds. A myth is said to be still 
 prevalent in Denmark to the effect that lapwings 
 represent the spirits of departed old maids, while 
 green sandpipers are the deceased bachelors. These 
 birds haunt the same marshy places, and when the 
 lapwings, sailing slowly through the air, wail in 
 mournful strains, 
 
 ' O why wouldn't you ? O why wouldn't you 7 
 
 the sandpipers in clear and ringing tones make 
 answer : 
 
 ' Because we dared not, because we dared not,' 
 
 followed by a chorus of mocking laughter from the 
 unrepentant crew. 
 
 In some of the mining districts of the North of 
 England the cry of the golden plover is dreaded as a 
 portent of coming evil. The colliers say that the 
 voices of these birds the wandering spirits of the 
 Jews who assisted at the Crucifixion are always 
 heard before disastrous explosions in the pits ; and 
 the men will even refuse to descend to their work 
 when they have heard, floating down through the 
 darkness, the mournful whistling of a troop of 
 plovers. 
 
 A brighter myth is linked with the humming-bird. 
 In the Aztec mythology humming-birds were the souls 
 of heroes who, having died in defence of the gods, 
 were conducted into the kingdom of the Sun, and
 
 Some Bird Myths. 173 
 
 wore, by command of that deity, a dress worthy of 
 their fair renown. 
 
 To even the soberest of mortals ' Halcyon Days ' 
 will suggest bygone seasons of calm and quiet ; hours 
 of peace and sunlit happiness; will carry the memory 
 back perchance to some sweet river idyll : 
 
 ' .... in some forgotten June 
 When they both were young together ; 
 Heart of youth and summer weather 
 Making all their holiday,' 
 
 and yet perhaps forget if he ever heard of it that 
 strange myth that Pliny wrote of, and that Montaigne 
 embellished with touches of his own, how the king- 
 fisher the Halcyon of Ovid's story builds her nest 
 in the depth of winter ; and how ' the very seas .... 
 know well when they sit and breed. And the time 
 whiles they are broodie is called halcyon daies; for 
 during that season the sea is calm and navigable, 
 especially on the coast of Sicilie.' 
 
 We smile at the credulity of an age which could 
 believe in the legend. We ourselves have no faith in 
 the old superstition ; but many a doubtful voyager 
 ' On life's dim unsounded sea ' would echo the wish 
 breathed in the tender lines of the quaint old poet : 
 
 ' Blow, but gently blow, faire winde 
 
 From the forsaken shore ; 
 And be as to the halcyon, kinde, 
 Till we have ferried o'er.'
 
 WHEN WOODS ARE BARE. 
 
 
 TN these dull December days the 
 woodlands wear their least attrac- 
 tive dress. Brown and faded leaves linger late upon, 
 the larches ; a few fiery sprays of bramble cling about 
 the tangled thickets ; festoons of bryony, shorn of their
 
 When Woods are Bare. 175 
 
 dark foliage, wander here and there among the bushes, 
 and hang their chains of rubies in the wintry sun. But 
 the red tresses of the beech lie thick on all the slopes 
 with the glow of a rich sunset; the last leaves of 
 the oak have floated gently down in drops of golden 
 rain ; the spoils of elm and sycamore, loosened by the 
 frost and scattered by the storm, are spread over the 
 earth like the pall of some barbaric chieftain. 
 
 Among the leafless trees the children of the forest, 
 who all the summer long found a safe asylum in the 
 greenwood, whose very presence was hardly noticed in 
 the quiet autumn days, now make themselves plain 
 enough to the least observant of wayfarers. 
 
 There is a stir of wings in all the tree-tops. The 
 thickets are haunted by troops of eager and industrious 
 foragers. On the ground is the rustle of innumerable 
 tiny feet turning over in quest of insects the brown 
 and yellow leaves. 
 
 One of the plainest to be seen of all the company is 
 the jay. In the spring-time he is shy and quiet, hiding 
 himself far aloof in the green depths of copse or 
 underwood, or among the shadows of an unfrequented 
 orchard. His voice is rarely heard. He flits silently 
 away at the approach of danger, and his bright wings 
 are seldom seen beyond the limits of his cover. 
 
 In the late summer, when household cares are over, 
 he and his family leave the shelter of the woods and 
 join the clans in their raids upon the ripening grain. 
 In the winter these parties are by voice and dress
 
 176 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 quite a feature of the wood. The white tail-coverts of 
 the jay, and the dark plumage of his wings and tail, 
 make him a striking object even at a distance as he 
 flits in his lively way from tree to tree. Seen near at 
 hand, the colours of his gay attire proclaim him what 
 he is, one of the most beautiful of our native birds. 
 
 There is no idea now of vanishing in silence. One 
 of the party, suspicious of danger, sounds a note of 
 alarm. The harsh scream is taken up by each in 
 turn until the whole glade is in a tumult. Then the 
 noisy crew retire deeper into their sylvan haunt 
 through the thick undergrowth of ash saplings which 
 rise like a mist among the trees. 
 
 Less frequently noticed, because less common and 
 much shyer and quieter than the jay, our three resident 
 woodpeckers are much more easily seen now among 
 the leafless branches. 
 
 The lesser spotted species is perhaps not so rare as 
 it is often thought to be. Gould even said that it 
 might be found in almost any large group of elms. 
 But from its habit of frequenting the topmost boughs 
 it is probably often passed by unnoticed. 
 
 The green woodpecker, although a recognised wood- 
 lander, is more partial to scattered timber than to the 
 depths of the forest. His home lies rather among the 
 grey wilderness of a West-country orchard, in the tall 
 elms that cluster in a corner of the meadow, or the 
 broad-leaved chestnuts of the solitary copse. 
 
 Follow the footpath that leads past the church and
 
 When Woods are Bare. 177 
 
 winds along in the shadow of the hill. These bare 
 rough banks are thick in spring-time with forests of 
 pale primroses, and the fresh green leaves of the sorrel. 
 On the shoulder of the hill up yonder is a clump of 
 feathery larches, among whose green spring shadows 
 the shy ringdove weaves her careless nest. Farther 
 on along the hillside rise the rugged outlines of the 
 grey limestone ramparts, in whose recesses rockdoves 
 breed, and among whose ancient yew-trees the bold 
 kestrel makes her home. 
 
 High up in the west, their great wings dark against 
 the saffron of the wintry sky, a party of herons drift 
 slowly out to fish among the moorland ditches. 
 
 All at once, from the dim shadows of the wood 
 yonder, where brown waves of bracken cluster round 
 the roots of stalwart beeches, and bright fungi hang 
 like coloured lamps about the moss-grown tree stumps, 
 comes the cry of a woodpecker. The next moment 
 he sweeps down from his cover to the tall sycamore 
 that stands like an outpost on the edge of the wood. 
 Scattered gleams of sunlight flicker on the golden stem, 
 as the branches sway gently in the wind, 
 
 As a sylph of the air had traced them there, 
 And then dashed them away with her wing. 
 
 The bird alights half-way up the tree, his figure sharply 
 outlined on the rare December blue. Clinging with 
 powerful claws to the trunk and supporting himself 
 with the stiff feathers of his tail, he peers into the 
 
 12
 
 178 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 chinks in search of insects ; or, swaying his whole 
 body to add force to the blow, he splits away the bark 
 with his strong beak, or digs deep into the soft wood 
 where it is beginning to decay. The sunshine glows 
 on the gold and green of his forester's livery, and 
 touches with an added fire the vivid crimson of his 
 crest. Now he looks up to answer the hail of some 
 brother of the craft, 
 
 And his jovial shout peals gaily out, 
 Like a stave of a drinking song. 
 
 There is a stir of footsteps on the leaves. He stops 
 his work and waits as still as if carved in wood. A 
 dead stick snaps under an unwary footstep. In a 
 moment the bird glides behind the trunk, and climb- 
 ing higher up, watches from behind a branch the 
 movements of the intruder. The steps draw nearer. 
 The woodpecker sweeps silently away from the other 
 side of the tree, skirts the long, tangled hedgerow, and 
 shows for a moment like a gleam of gold ere he 
 vanishes among 1 the grey shadows of his favourite 
 orchard. There is a hole in the stem of the old 
 pollard ash in the hedge yonder that may have been 
 his nest. 
 
 Many birds make their homes in holes in trees ; but 
 the green woodpecker cuts his out for himself, gener- 
 ally in the very heart of a living tree. He does, it is 
 true, make plenty of shallow, irregular cuttings in 
 rotten wood, in search of the grubs and beetles that
 
 When Woods are Bare. 179 
 
 burrow in the soft material ; but the excavation in- 
 tended for a residence is cut round and true at the 
 opening, and sometimes descends two feet into the 
 solid timber. Nest, in the ordinary sense, thers is 
 none. The exquisite ivory eggs are laid on a bed of 
 chips at the bottom of the hole. 
 
 Exceptionally powerful muscles are provided for the 
 beak which has such work to do, and it has been 
 observed that when the woodpecker strikes a blow its 
 eyelids close at the same moment. 
 
 This curious sympathetic action, which seems to 
 have escaped the notice of writers on ornithology, is 
 evidently to protect the eyes from flying chips. 
 
 The bird is extremely shy ; it is not easy to watch 
 the operation of nest-making. It would be interest- 
 ing to clear up the vexed question whether the chips 
 are, or are not, removed from the ground under the 
 hole so as to avoid discovery. Professor Newton 
 states that he has never known it done; but many 
 occupied nests have been found from which all 
 traces of the work had, from some cause or other, 
 disappeared. The birds, in such cases, may have 
 been prompted by painful experience or family 
 tradition. 
 
 Few birds use their nests for shelter after the young 
 have flown ; but woodpeckers appear to sleep in their 
 holes as a regular thing, and in some instances they 
 return to the same tree to breed year after year. One 
 case is on record in which a pair of these birds, or 
 
 12 2
 
 i8o By Leafy Ways. 
 
 their descendants, tenanted the same hole for thirty 
 years in succession. 
 
 Another hole-builder, but in a different style, is the 
 nut-hatch. He selects a hollow ready-made, and if 
 the entrance is too large for his fancy he reduces its 
 size by plastering it up with mud. 
 
 Not, however, like the hornbill Mr. Wallace writes 
 of, who imprisons his mate in her nest with a rampart 
 of mud ; feeding her indeed, but keeping her thus in 
 custody until her one chick is safely fledged. What 
 experiences of heartless desertion there must have 
 been to have brought matters to such a pass as 
 this! 
 
 The nut-hatch is even more of an acrobat than the 
 woodpecker, for he seems to run down a tree with 
 greater ease than up it ; and when he alights on a 
 branch at some height above his nest he positively 
 appears to trickle into his hole. 
 
 He is a pretty bird, both in his dress and his 
 manners ; and when in the winter, emboldened by the 
 scarcity of food, he even joins the sparrows who flock 
 round the door for crumbs not unfrequently driving 
 all other birds away or, clinging in graceful attitudes 
 to the dark foliage, he plunders the yew-tree of its 
 brilliant fruit, his charming ways render him an ever- 
 welcome visitor. 
 
 But of all the dwellers in the wood by far the most 
 numerous and most easily seen are the titmice. A 
 party of long-tailed tits, as many as thirty strong, fly
 
 When Woods are Bare. 181 
 
 from bush to bush across the underwood. Their 
 skirmishers search among the few last leaves that 
 linger in the tree-tops ; they investigate every crevice 
 of the rustling ground. They keep up a continual 
 chatter as they go ; their fluffy little round bodies and 
 strangely long tails singling them out plainly enough 
 from the rest of the busy company. They are every- 
 where at once. The wood is alive with them. And 
 all the while there swing from swaying boughs or 
 rocking pine-tops the other members of the clan the 
 great tit, with his bold and brilliant colouring; the 
 blue tit, with his smart blue bonnet; the marsh tit, 
 and the coal tit, with their neat and quiet tints. 
 
 They are a merry crew, gifted with blithe and 
 musical voices. And among them all the great tit, in 
 particular, is the lyric poet of the spring. In the early 
 days of January his clear sonorous call rises above the 
 shrill treble of the robin, and the stammering pipe of 
 the yet unpractised song-thrush. And in the sweet 
 sunshine of happy April days his voice chimes in like 
 the lilt of a swinging chorus, when, with music from a 
 hundred throats, 
 
 The quivering air thrills everywhere 
 One rippling sea of song.
 
 THE BIRD'S-EYE VIEW. 
 
 A FAMILIAR figure on the wintry sky of these 
 dark December days is the roving kestrel, so 
 plain to see now in the leafless landscape. Now he 
 drifts across the moor ; now he pauses to hover on 
 quick-beating wings ; now he sinks downward through 
 the frosty air to rest for a brief space upon the ground. 
 
 A flock of redwings scattered over the meadow- 
 cower among the grass in terror as the keen wings 
 sweep overhead, or with shrill notes of alarm hurry to 
 the shelter of the nearest hedgerow. A troop of lap- 
 wings too, gathered in a motley crowd along the edge 
 of the pool that lies in the long hollow of the pasture, 
 catch sight of the flying figure, and rise hastily with 
 anxious cries as the dreaded wings draw near. 
 
 But the hawk has no eyes for them. He is on the 
 watch for humbler booty, and the thrush and the lap- 
 wing have little to fear from his sharp bill, unless he 
 is driven by the scarcity of his usual simple fare to fly 
 at higher game.
 
 The Bird's-Eye View. 183 
 
 A party of linnets, busy in a clump of thistles, rise 
 into the air with a musical chorus, and, instead of 
 fleeing for shelter, give chase to the unoffending hawk. 
 Now, they gain on his deliberate flight, and swoop 
 down so as almost to brush him with their wings ; now, 
 they scatter right and left at some movement they 
 think may mean pursuit. They follow him a field or 
 two, and then retire, exulting in what they seem to 
 regard as his discomfiture. 
 
 A kestrel rarely turns when thus pursued, but a 
 sparrow-hawk is apt to take the thing less calmly, and 
 will sometimes avenge his injuries in the blood even 
 of a brace of his impudent assailants. A cuckoo is 
 often mobbed in a similar manner ; and a belated owl 
 venturing out in daylight is pursued by half the birds 
 of the parish. 
 
 As we watch the skilful evolutions of the kestrel, 
 his pause, his hover, and his swift descent, we are 
 tempted to wonder how so small an object as a mouse 
 or a beetle can be seen from such a height above the 
 ground. The wonder grows in the case of larger birds 
 of prey vultures especially, who from a height perhaps 
 of thousands of feet descry the wounded deer or dying 
 sheep when they themselves are far beyond our ken. 
 
 One of the commonest experiences of a desert 
 march is the sudden appearance of vultures when 
 some unfortunate beast, exhausted by the journey on 
 the burning sand, has fallen out of the line and been 
 left to perish by the way.
 
 184 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 It is a treeless waste ; no mountains even, except as 
 a dim line on the horizon ; but hardly has the dying 
 beast sunk down, when from every side, coming out of 
 the clear blue heaven, are seen those tiny specks that 
 dilating as they fly, grow into great evil-looking vul- 
 tures swiftly descending to the feast ; while the sur- 
 vivors, knowing well the ominous rush of those terrible 
 wings, press on with eager haste, throwing fearful 
 glances back, and wondering if the morrow's dawn 
 will shine upon their whitened bones one more link 
 in that fatal chain of skeletons that marks the way 
 across the waste. 
 
 It was long supposed that the marvellous power of 
 the vulture in discovering a dead body lay in its sense 
 of smell. A writer of the thirteenth century, in speak- 
 ing of the faculties of animals, gravely asserts that a 
 vulture can smell a carcase at a distance of 500 miles. 
 Others, bolder still, declared it was no matter even if 
 the sea should intervene. 
 
 The experiments of Darwin, Audubon, and others, 
 however, have shown that birds depend much more 
 on sight than smell, if indeed the latter faculty plays 
 any appreciable part at all. Captive vultures have 
 been known even to stand upon the canvas which 
 concealed a piece of putrid meat, without discovering 
 what lay beneath it until the covering was purposely 
 torn. 
 
 The condor the great vulture of the Andes has 
 been known to fly at a height of 15,000 feet. Perhaps
 
 The Bird's-Eye View. 185 
 
 even at 2,000 feet a soaring bird would be unnoticed 
 by, and perhaps invisible to, the traveller, while it is 
 quite likely that a number of vultures would remain at 
 that height, at wide intervals no doubt, forming a 
 chain of observation extending far over the country. 
 One bird swoops downward. The movement is fol- 
 lowed by others in their turn, until the news of plunder 
 has been spread perhaps for fifty miles. 
 
 Most of the higher orders of animals, no doubt, 
 possess in a state of nature far-reaching powers of 
 sight. The hunter who has followed the chamois 
 among its native mountains knows well the keenness 
 of its vision. But it is probable that birds excel all 
 other creatures in this as in the power of flight. 
 
 The epithet ' lynx-eyed ' is based upon a misconcep- 
 tion. The word does not really refer to the beast at 
 all, but to Lynceus, the Argonaut, the hero of the 
 Calydonian Hunt, whose power of finding treasure in 
 the bowels of the earth first brought the word into 
 existence. 
 
 Even the smaller birds have vision far before our 
 feeble powers. If we watch a flock of starlings picking 
 up without a moment's pause a harvest from the 
 meadow, and then, driving them away, examine the 
 spot which they found so productive, we shall in all 
 probability see nothing but the grass of the field 
 where the industrious and keen-eyed birds were glean- 
 ing a sufficient feast of flies, and grubs, and centipedes, 
 too small for the casual observer to discover.
 
 186 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 The eyes of birds when compared with those of 
 other animals present some marked and palpable dif- 
 ferences. They are much more variously coloured ; 
 the iris is of all hues, from white to .black. It may be 
 red or blue, brown or yellow. The eye is large in 
 proportion to the head, especially in the case of late- 
 flying birds who need to make the most of the dim 
 light of evening. 
 
 Among several singular points of internal structure 
 the most remarkable is the presence of a jointed ring 
 of bone, which lies in front of the eyeball, round the 
 iris. It consists of a number of segments or plates 
 firmly united together, but still admitting of some 
 amount of movement at the will of the bird, who by 
 this means is supposed to be able to alter the shape of 
 the crystalline lens, which lies behind the ring, and 
 thus to vary the focus of its eyes. 
 
 Were the eyes of the kestrel constructed like our 
 own, we might well expect that it would lose sight of 
 so' small an object as a mouse in its descent. We 
 find that birds of prey, have large eyes, with these 
 bony rings particularly broad and strong ; and by this 
 arrangement can keep their prey in view. The swift, 
 again, whose keen wings carry it through the air at the 
 rate of some miles in a minute, has a similar provision, 
 both as regards the size of its eyes and the development 
 of its sclerotic plates. 
 
 A curious modification is seen in the owls, whose 
 eyes are encased in rings, or rather tubes, each con-
 
 The Bird's-Eye View. 187 
 
 sisting of fifteen separate pieces of bone, and strongly 
 resembling the eyeglass used by a working watch- 
 maker. 
 
 The development of this focussing apparatus is 
 equally marked in birds that are in the habit of diving 
 in pursuit of fish. 
 
 Watch the white gannet as he sails on long keen 
 wings over the restless sea. He has caught sight of a 
 fish. Pausing suddenly, he hovers like a hawk, though 
 his narrow, pointed tail seems ill adapted to steady 
 him in the air. Now falling swiftly perhaps a hundred 
 feet the gannet disappears in a cloud of spray. It 
 usually stays under but four or five seconds, but is 
 capable of much longer immersion, and indeed is 
 provided with space for the storage of air perhaps 
 for breathing purposes three times as great as that in 
 the human lungs. 
 
 The better to follow its prey under water, the gannet 
 has very large eyes, and its sclerotic rings, composed 
 of twelve plates of bone, are especially broad and 
 thick. 
 
 Those who have chased in vain the divers that in 
 summer are seen upon the Broads of Norfolk will 
 have had ample evidence of the keen vision of a 
 diving bird. 
 
 It is on ' The Queen of the Broads ' perhaps that 
 the yachtsman, climbing out of his berth at daybreak, 
 sees the graceful figure of some large bird, very low in 
 the water, drifting along among the coots and moor-
 
 iSS By Leafy Ways. 
 
 hens that have come out from their covert in the 
 reeds. It dives now and then, coming up with a fish 
 in its beak. 
 
 You cast off the dingy and pull gently towards the 
 bird. He takes no notice at first, perhaps ; but before 
 long you observe that he comes up farther away after 
 each dive, and as you quicken your stroke he hurries 
 too, paddling swiftly away, and again diving out of 
 sight. You have put on a hard spurt while he was 
 down, and he comes up within range. There is a 
 flash and a sharp report; you have surely got him 
 now. But there is nothing there but the widening 
 rings that tell how the bird, warned by the flash, was 
 safe beneath the surface ere the shower of shot swept 
 harmless over his head.
 
 THE WINTRY SHORE. 
 
 A MONO the many sea-fowl which are seen at 
 ^ various times about the broad river mouths, on 
 the yellow sands or along the rugged steeps of our 
 long and wandering coast line, there are not a few 
 which are to be regarded as a sort of floating popula- 
 tion, changing with the changing season. 
 
 Some, like the terns, are seen here only in the 
 summer. They come to our shores to breed, and 
 leave us again in the autumn. 
 
 Others retire to inland moors, or even to Arctic 
 latitudes, for the summer, and return when the breed- 
 ing season is past. 
 
 As for the rest, there are, scattered up and down 
 the coast, a number of stations where sea birds gather 
 from all directions at the pairing-time. When the 
 young are hatched these colonies break up and the 
 birds distribute themselves again round the islands. 
 
 Conspicuous at all seasons among the gulls that 
 stand out like points of light along the cliff-ledges is
 
 igo By Leafy Ways. 
 
 the dark figure of the cormorant. It is most abundant 
 on a rock-bound coast, but there are few parts of our 
 seaboard where it is altogether a stranger. 
 
 Perhaps its most characteristic position is some 
 isolated fragment of rock at a little distance from the 
 land. Well out of range, even at low water, its dark 
 sides picked out with tufts of samphire, and with stains 
 of lichen relieving the rich reds and browns of the sea- 
 worn stone, rises the stern outline of 'The Shag 
 Rock.' 
 
 Side by side along the narrow ledges stand the 
 sombre figures of these toilers of the sea ; some still 
 in the brow r n livery of their younger days, others in 
 the velvety black that marks the attainment of their 
 third season. Now one leaves the ranks, and stretch- 
 ing out its long neck like a duck flies heavily along 
 the water to another station. 
 
 A floating buoy or an old mooring-post by the 
 shore makes a favourite resting-place ; and it is not 
 uncommon to find some particular point held year 
 after year by the same bird not always without fight- 
 ing for it. 
 
 On the broken mast of some ill-fated vessel, covered 
 with clustering barnacles, and with a few frayed ropes 
 still trailing idly in the water one of those sad 
 suggestions 
 
 ' Of ships dismasted, that were hailed, 
 And sent no answer back again,' 
 
 a solitary cormorant will rest for hours, upright as a
 
 The Wintry Shore. igi 
 
 sentinel on guard ; looking for all the world like some 
 spirit of evil, meditating mischief. 
 
 It is a dexterous diver in pursuit of fish, and after 
 long -continued immersion remaining under water 
 sometimes as long as fifty seconds its feathers become 
 so drenched that it cannot fly. It will then stand 
 erect upon some favourite station with its great wings 
 spread wide to dry in the sun, looking at once weird 
 and gigantic in a failing light. 
 
 A cormorant which was fired at while thus standing 
 at ease disgorged a dozen good-sized fish before it 
 succumbed to a second shot. 
 
 This habit of lightening itself for quicker escape 
 has probably given rise to the strange idea about the 
 bird's powers of rapid digestion. ' A shag,' said a 
 Cornish fisherman, ' is a very quare bird. If you 
 see one swallow a fish, and shoot him, and open 
 him, the fish is gone. A shag, you see, is so hot 
 inside.' 
 
 When a cormorant is fired at, the whole flock will 
 sometimes fall into the sea as if shot ; but on rowing 
 to the place to pick up his booty, the astonished sports- 
 man will very probably see half a dozen black heads 
 just showing above the water where the birds are 
 swimming for dear life. In confinement the bird 
 becomes very tame, and often much attached to its 
 master. Many stories are told of the boldness and 
 rapacity of such captives. One attacked a pointer so 
 fiercely that the dog died of its wounds. Another
 
 192 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 swallowed the head and neck of a tame duck before 
 the unhappy bird was rescued by a bystander. 
 
 A more expert diver even than the cormorant is its 
 white relative the gannet The breeding haunts of 
 this bird are limited to a few stations, all of which 
 are on the Scotch coast, except one on Lundy and 
 one in Kerry. The largest colony, on the island 
 called Sula Sgeir, near Lewis, is estimated to number 
 300,000 birds. 
 
 The gannet lives on fish, and the quantity of 
 herrings consumed annually by the united efforts of 
 the birds on the five northern stations exceeds the 
 entire take of the whole fishing fleet of Scotland, 
 artd is said to fall little short of one thousand 
 millions. 
 
 The gannet moves south in the autumn, and is to 
 be seen during the winter months along our southern 
 shores. 
 
 When in pursuit of its prey it poises in the air like 
 a hawk, and, falling with a force that strikes up the 
 water all round it in a cloud of foam, it disappears for 
 some seconds below the surface. By floating a fish 
 upon a small plank, the bird is often killed by the 
 fishermen, who use its flesh merely for bait. Not 
 noticing the plank, the gannet swoops down upon the 
 fish, drives its beak deep into the board, and breaks 
 its neck with the shock. 
 
 Gannets are often taken in the herring-nets, some- 
 Limes at extraordinary depths. As many as ninety
 
 The Wintry Shore. 193 
 
 have been brought up at one time in the meshes of a 
 single net. 
 
 The prim figure of the puffin, with its quaint, up- 
 right attitude and curious red bill, is not a familiar 
 object in winter. The bird is found throughout the 
 year on some parts of the coast ; but when we read 
 that the Scilly Islands were held in the fourteenth 
 century under the King as Earl of Cornwall by an 
 annual payment of three hundred puffins at Michael- 
 mas, we are forced to think that the birds must have 
 been pickled. 
 
 The guillemot and the razorbill, also, though not 
 unknown in the winter, are much more numerous in 
 the summer months. 
 
 An egg of a kindred species to the razorbill, the 
 great auk or gairfowl, was sold by auction in London 
 lately for no less a sum than 22%. These remark- 
 able birds, so helpless on the shore that in their 
 ancient haunts sailors were accustomed to drive them 
 by scores along a plank into a boat > yet so dexterous 
 in the water that a six-oared galley has followed them 
 in vain, must now be reckoned among the things that 
 were. A hundred years ago they were already be- 
 coming scarce. It is more than twice that time since 
 they were common on the coast of Greenland, on 
 islands near Newfoundland, and around the shores of 
 Iceland, where the last birds seen alive were captured 
 in 1844. 
 
 Three specimens only are all that are known with 
 
 13
 
 194 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 certainty to have been taken in British waters during 
 this century. 
 
 There is faint hope of their survival in some of 
 their remoter haunts near Iceland, and although it has 
 been suggested that the gairfowl may have retired 
 northward, and that in some unexplored region round 
 the Pole it may yet be rediscovered, there is only one 
 doubtful record of the occurrence of a great auk 
 within the Arctic Circle. 
 
 The commonest of the larger sea birds on the wintry 
 shore are the gulls. Some of them pass through so 
 many alterations of shade and marking that it becomes 
 a little difficult to recognise with certainty any particular 
 gull at all seasons. 
 
 The herring gull, one of the commonest and also 
 one of the largest of the tribe, takes nearly five years 
 to acquire its perfect tones of white and grey. 
 
 The black-headed gulls lose their dark hoods in 
 the autumn moult and resume them in the early 
 spring. 
 
 It is in its immature plumage that the graceful kitti- 
 wake is slaughtered in thousands for the sake of its 
 prettily barred wings. It is a widely distributed 
 species, and has far more claim to be called the 
 ' common ' gull than the bird which passes under that 
 name ; it is, indeed, doubtful whether the latter breeds 
 in England at all. 
 
 The kittiwake is often used for food, and is cele- 
 brated in some places as a sort of tonic. A story is
 
 The Wintry Shore. 195 
 
 told of a man who ate six to whet his appetite for 
 dinner, and then complained that he was no more 
 hungry than when he began. 
 
 Like most sea birds, gulls are fond of keeping out 
 to sea, but in rough weather are often driven inland. 
 In allusion to this there is an old rhyme current in 
 the North of Ireland : 
 
 ' Sea-gull, sea-gull, sit on the sand ; 
 It's never fine weather when.y<?# come to land.' 
 
 Sea-birds are perhaps seen at their best on a low 
 shore when the tide is going down. Each fresh patch 
 of sand or shingle that is left bare by the retiring 
 waves is occupied by clamorous gulls, or silent, eager 
 waders busily searching among the sand and stones 
 for the rich harvest of the sea. 
 
 Here a party of oyster-catchers, smartly dressed in 
 that conspicuous ' arrangement in black and white ' 
 which earns for them the appropriate name of sea- 
 pies, settle down on a mussel-bank which is just 
 beginning to show its long dark back above the surf. 
 Picking their dainty way over the sand and mud, they 
 turn over with their bright red beaks the masses of 
 olive sea-weed that shine like gold in the warm sun- 
 shine, and peer into every crevice for razor-shell or 
 star-fish that may have been stranded among the 
 stones. 
 
 On a strip of bright sand a little troop of ringed- 
 plovers silently alight, and hurry along by the edge of 
 
 132
 
 ig6 By Leafy Ways. 
 
 the water, showing now and then as they raise their 
 heads the neat black gorgets that cross their snowy 
 breasts. 
 
 Roving here and there among the pebbles a com- 
 pany of turnstones are hard at work, their red legs and 
 bills brilliant in the sunlight. 
 
 A cloud of sandpipers, after sailing a long way up 
 the beach and then sharply back again, apparently 
 unable to decide where to look for their dinners, 
 suddenly settle down and spread out like skirmishers 
 far and wide over the yellow sand. 
 
 Rocking idly on the waves a few herring gulls are 
 floating over their snowy reflections in the green water. 
 Hard by them stand a pair of stately herons waiting 
 perhaps until the tide goes down. Farther out a cor- 
 morant is diving for his dinner. 
 
 Along the edge of the sea wander a troop of curlews 
 wariest of all the dwellers on the shore. Should 
 one of them sound an alarm the scattered flocks of 
 dunlins and plovers raise their heads and hurry closer 
 together. The oyster-catchers stop their work and 
 prepare for flight. If the warning is repeated the 
 whole crew rise on the wing with plaintive cries, and, 
 breaking up into parties, move farther off to remoter 
 hunting-grounds. 
 
 Suddenly from behind the headland sweeps a rolling 
 sea-fog : a great white cloud of seething vapour. The 
 bright sunlight, that but a moment since seemed like 
 the' soul of a balmy April day, is veiled under the
 
 The Wintry Shore. 
 
 197 
 
 shadowy canopy. The air grows chill and damp. The 
 touches of gold melt away from the shining sea-wrack. 
 The warm tones fade from the rich brown boulders, 
 the silver settings from the glistening pebbles. The 
 troops of waders, far out along the falling tide, grow 
 indistinct and disappear. The plovers, as they run 
 across the sand, vanish in the mist. The plaintive call 
 of the curlew, the musical trill of the oyster-catcher, 
 the melancholy voices of the gulls float faintly over the 
 shingle, awesome and mysterious, like phantom voices 
 in a shadow land, 
 
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