Thirty years it took me to discover these simple, obvious facts about a thing I had handled every spring since childhood: how many decades more, I wonder, must pass ere I shall clear up the final mystery about them, a matter now to me dark as ever—how, with the primrose alone, this came to be so; and, above all, why? III If I tell the plain, honest truth about the day which has just ended, and call it a day of adventure and excitement from its first grey gleam to its tranquil golden close, I am not sure that there are many who will understand me, save the one who shared it with me almost hour by hour. For nothing really happened on this day, as the world estimates events. Over an obscure Sussex village, a mid-April sun shone out of a cloudless sky; certain migrant birds arrived in the neighbourhood; certain wild flowers and insects were observed for the first time; there was nothing more. No wandering stranger appeared in the street, to bring us all to our doors; no big-gun practice was going on thirty miles away at Portsmouth, outraging our blue sky with incongruous thunder; nor did even the gilt arrow on the church-clock slip an hour at midday, as it often does, and send us scurrying home to dinner before the time. To all save two in Windlecombe, the day was just an ordinary working week-day; but, to these, it was no less a day than the one on which the year comes suddenly into its full young prime. For me it began when the grey eastern sky took its first tint of morning rose. There is no sweeter sound than the song of the house-martins, and this it was that roused me now. In the darkness they had come, straight to their old nesting-site under the eaves; and now they filled the room with their quaint, voluble melody, and wove a mazy pattern against the sky as they circled to and fro. While I dressed, I watched them dipping and crying in the sunny air; and, peering out through the window now and again, I could see them all along under the eaves, clinging to the rough bricks of the wall, where they had left their mud-houses last October. But of these none remained now. Not to break down the martins’ nests in early spring, before the sparrows begin to stuff them with grass, is to prepare for the little black-and-white voyagers’ war instead of welcome. And they seem quite as happy and content if, returning, they find nothing but a clay-mark on the wall.