but as soon as I went in they descended four or five together, chattering and fluttering about the entrance, peeping in at the little window, and stretching their necks as far as they could, to see where I was, and if all was right. Then they would begin their breakfast on what I had left for them, talking a great deal about it, but occasionally ogling the door, in a manner from which I concluded that there was but small esteem or gratitude in their conversation.----Far different was the friendship of our little neighbour in the holly. In the morning he used to come down and perch on the arm of the bird-cherry, which stretched over the precipice before the door, waiting for its opening and the preparation of the breakfast, which he always shared; and when we were seated he would venture over the sill, and gather the crumbs about the table at our feet. Often when the first blood-red streaks of the autumn morning shone like lurid fire through the little window, we were awakened by his sad and solitary whistle, as he sat on his usual branch, his jet-black eye cast towards the door, impatient for our appearance. Many of his little cousins there were in the wood, with whom we were also well acquainted, and between us happened many an incident, which increased our interest and familiarity. "I remember a day, one of those deep still blue days so solemn in the forest; the ground was covered with a foot of snow, and all the trees were hanging like gigantic ostrich feathers; but all the world was blue,--the sky was a sleeping mass of those heavy indigo clouds which forebode a 'feeding storm,'--not a tempest, but a fall of snow; for, in Scotland, snow is called '_storm_,' however light and still it falls: thus, in tracking the deer, we say he 'has brushed the _storm_ from the heather;' and a '_feeding storm_' is when the clouds are continually feeding the earth with its velvet pall.--The reflection of those deep-blue clouds cast a delicate tint of the same colour over the whitened world. I was standing with my back against a huge pine--one of the old remnant of the great forest of Moray, which had, no doubt, heard the bell toll for the first Stuart earl.--I counted the rings in a smaller tree which once stood in the same hollow;--I shunned its wreck as I would have avoided a corpse which I could not bury, and always, when I passed near it, averted my face; but one day running to cut off a buck, and just heading him, I dropped on my knee to receive him as he came out from a mass of junipers, and when reloading, I found that I had knelt by the stump of my old friend.--I counted two hundred and sixty-four rings in his wood!--how many earls had he seen?--Well, I was leaning against his elder brother, as I suppose by the size.