and only recede a yard at a time, as you push through the tall grass, flags, and underwood. Stand where you can see the brook, not too near, but so as to see it through a fringe of sedges and willows. The pink lychnis or ragged robin grows among the grasses; the iris flowers higher on the shore. The water-vole comes swimming past on his way to nibble the green weeds in the stream round about the great branch which fell two winters since and remains in the water. Aquatic plants take root in its shelter. There, too, a moorhen goes, sometimes diving under the bough. A blackbird flies up to drink or bathe, never at the grassy edge, but always choosing a spot where he can get at the stream free from obstruction. The sound of many birds singing comes from the hedge across the meadow; it mingles with the rush of the water through a drawn hatch—finches and linnets, thrush and chiff-chaff, wren and whitethroat, and others farther away, whose louder notes only, reach. The singing is so mixed and interwoven, and is made of so many notes, it seems as if it were the leaves singing, the countless leaves, as if they had voices. A brightly coloured bird, the redstart, appears suddenly in spring, like a flower that has bloomed before the bud was noticed. Red is his chief colour, and as he rushes out from his perch to take an insect on the wing, he looks like a red streak. These birds sometimes nest near farmhouses in the rickyards, sometimes by copses, and sometimes in the deepest and most secluded coombes or glens, the farthest places from habitation; so that they cannot be said to have any preference, as so many birds have, for a particular kind of locality; but they return year by year to the places they have chosen. The return of the corncrake or landrail is quickly recognised by the noise he makes in the grass; he is the noisiest of all the spring-birds. The return of the goatsucker is hardly noticed at first. This is not at all a rare, but rather a local bird, well known in many places, but in others unnoticed, except by those who feel a special interest. A bird must be common and plentiful before people generally observe it, so that there are many of the labouring class who have never seen the goatsucker, or would say so, if you asked them. Few observe the migration of the turtle-doves, perhaps confusing them with the wood-pigeons, which stay in the fields all the winter. By the time the sap is well up in the oaks, all the birds have arrived, and the tremulous cooing of the turtle-dove is heard by those engaged in barking the felled trees. The sap rises slowly in the oaks, moving gradually through the minute interstices or capillary tubes of this close-grained wood; the softer timber trees are full of it long before the oak; and when the oak is putting forth its leaves, it is high spring. Doves stay so much at this time in the great hawthorns of the hedgerows and at the edge of the copses, that they are seldom noticed, though comparatively large birds.