This cry in the darkness above me, however, was strange in a double sense; because, while the silent hosts were emigrants, only at the commencement of their long, perilous journey, this chattering company had safely arrived at its bourne, all the hazards of the voyage happily past. And it seemed only in the way of Nature, for bird or man, to set forth mute of voice upon a difficult and dangerous enterprise; while to win through safe and sound must provoke each alike to self-congratulation. My fieldfares were halloaing because they were out of the wood. NOVEMBER I ‘No mirth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member; No warmth, no shine, no butterflies, no bees— November!’ IT was the old vicar of Windlecombe who ironically quoted the lines, as we went along our favourite path together—the path that runs between Arun river and the woods. The first frosts had come and gone, and left us in the midst of the usual revolutions and surprises. In a single day, the ash-trees had cast their whole weight of foliage to earth, green as in summer prime. Though as yet not a single leaf had fallen from the other forest trees, all had changed miraculously. The beech-woods looked like vast smouldering fires. Every elm stood up clothed to its finger-tips in shreds of gold-leaf. Here and there in the wood a dash of vivid scarlet showed where a sycamore had been found and struck by the frost. Larch, willow, maple, birch, each added to the glowing prospect its individual shade of tawny brown, or drab, or yellow. We walked in a land where, for once, the sunshine seemed a superfluous thing. To turn the eye away for a little while from all that intolerable radiance, and rest it on the oak-woods where alone a vestige of summer greenery endured, or on the cool grey stems of the stripped ash-trees, was a pleasure I found myself furtively snatching as we went along, although I left the sentiment discreetly unexpressed. The old vicar stopped, removed his great white panama, and mopped his forehead luxuriously. ‘No warmth, no shine!’ he repeated. ‘Now where in the world could the poor soul have lived who wrote that? And no bees! Why, I can hear them now—thousands of them!’