On days when the sun shone they came in numbers to perch on the telegraph wires stretched across a field between the cottage and village. It was beautiful to see them, a double line fifty or sixty yards long of the small, pale-coloured, graceful birdlings, sitting so close together as to be almost touching, all with their beaks pointing to the west, from where the wind blew. In this same field, one day when this pleasant company were leaving us after a week's rest, I picked up one that had killed himself by striking against the wire. A most delicate little dead swallow, looking in his pale colouring and softness as moth-like in death as he had seemed when alive and flying. I took him home--the little moth-bird pilgrim to Africa, who had got no farther than the Itchen on his journey--and buried him at the roots of a {270} honeysuckle growing by the cottage door. It seemed fittest that he should be put there, to become part with the plant which, in the pallid yellows and dusky reds of its blossoms, and in the perfume it gives out so abundantly at eventide, has an expression of melancholy, and is more to us in some of our moods than any other flower. [Sidenote: An orphaned blackbird] The bad weather brought to our little plot of ground a young blackbird, who had evidently been thrown upon the world too early in life. A good number of blackbird broods had been brought off in the bushes about us, and in the rough and tumble of those tempestuous days some of the young had no doubt got scattered and lost; this at all events was one that had called and called to be fed and warmed and comforted in vain--we had heard him calling for days--and who had now grown prematurely silent, and had soberly set himself to find his own living as best he could. Between the lawn and the small sweetbriar hedge there was a strip of loose mould where roses had been planted, and here the bird had discovered that by turning over the dead leaves and loose earth a few small morsels were to be found. During those cold, windy, wet days we observed him there diligently searching in his poor, slow little way. He would strike his beak into the loose ground, making a little hop forward at the same time to give force to the stroke, and throw up about as much earth as would cover a shilling-piece; then he would gaze attentively at the spot, and after a couple of seconds hop and strike again; and {271} finally, if he could see nothing to eat, he would move on a few inches and begin again in another place. That was all his art--his one poor little way of getting a living; and it was plain to see from his bedraggled appearance and feeble motions, that he was going the way of most young orphaned birds.