‘Your singer has flown. And there goes the hen, out of the other side of the bush; if the nest is anywhere, it will be here under this tangle of clematis. Yes, two eggs already! I wish you could see their clear greenish-blue, with the dapple-marks on it.’ I guided his hand to the nest, and his fingers wandered lightly over it. ‘Cold!’ said he. ‘She will not begin to sit yet. Perhaps never on this clutch. There is frost and snow ahead of us still, though all of us forget it this weather, bird, beast, and man.’ The path led us into the hazelwood; hazel below, and overhead soaring columns of beech, whose branches touched finger-tips everywhere across the white-flecked blue of the sky. As we went along, the sound of our footsteps in the fallen leaves was like the sound of wading through water. I must read off to him what I saw about me as though it were from a book. ‘The hazel-catkins were never so fine, I think, as they are this spring. The wood is full of them, like showers of gold-green rain falling. Whenever we brush against them, clouds of pollen drift off in the wind. It is the wind that makes the hazel-nuts which we gather by and by. What millions upon millions of spores only to make a few bushels of nuts! I struck a single bush with my stick just now, and, for yards ahead, the sunshine was misty with the floating green dust. Then, here and there on every branch—’ ‘Yes! I can see it all! There are little green buds each with a torch of bright crimson at its tip, flaming in the sun. Why should they be so vividly coloured, if only to catch what the wind brings—floating pollen as blind as I? No, no! The hazel-nut was made for the bees originally, depend upon it. Nature never uses bright colour unless to attract winged life.’ We came out of the wood on the south side. Stopping just within the shade of the last trees, we had a view over a chain of sunny, sheltered meadows that lay between the riverside willows and the first steep escarpment of the Downs. Here the wind was only a song above our heads. Scarce a breath stirred where we leaned upon the gate in the sunshine. I must be at my living book again, yet knew not where to begin, so crowded was the page. ‘March is still three weeks off, and yet the hares are already as mad as can be. Over there under the Hanger, a mile away, I can see them racing and tumbling about together. There are more celandines and coltsfoot blossom everywhere. I can see daisies wherever I look, and there is a disc of dandelion by the gate-post just where you stand. What clouds of midges! Thousands are dancing in the air above our heads, and I can see their wings making a hazy streak of light all down the hedgerow, where the elders are in flourishing green leaf. Did you ever hear so many birds all singing at the same time? And there goes an army of rooks and jackdaws overhead! What a din!—the high, yelping treble of the daws, and the deep-voiced rooks singing bass to it.’