Life, life seemed everywhere. The wild birds were singing, calling, flying backwards and forwards and seeking food. The speckled storm-cock, as they call the missel thrush in Shropshire, was singing gloriously on the top branch of a gnarled apple tree, whilst from a bush of ribes as I passed along, a frightened blackbird lumbered away with his angry protesting rattle. How handsome he is, the cock blackbird, with his plumage of raven hue, and his golden dagger of a beak. In the twilight how irresistible is the deep regret of his song. It is a song, sweet, tender, full of old memories, and brings back in its subtle melancholy, dear faces, and the touch of dear lost hands that helped and loved us once. The blackbird's note is quite different from the thrush; the thrush's song is all pure joy, and glad expectation. He sings of morning, and all his notes are in a major key. He chants of wholesome work, of brave endeavour, and of spring gladness. His rapture is like that of the early poets. No note of sorrow dulls his glorious morning. Joy, health, happiness, these are the keynotes of his rhapsody--and we are grateful to him as we are grateful for the sunshine, for the laughter of children, and for the scent of flowers. It is hard to say which song we love best. But why choose, for are not both God's feathered choristers, and their songs our earliest melodies of childhood? How feverishly busy everything was that morning, and how seriously all living things took the annual dawn of life. The birds on the lawns were pecking, pecking everywhere, finding food and seeking materials for the future homes of their young. [Illustration: _THE SOUTH WEST VIEW OF WENLOCK ABBEY. IN THE COUNTY OF SALOP._ _From Buck's View._ WENLOCK ABBEY IN 1731.] I stood quite still, against an ivied wall, and watched an old thrush bring up a fat snail in her beak. In a second she had cracked the shell upon a monastic stone, and was feasting greedily on the contents. When she had flown away, I examined the bits of broken shell, and discovered that they were of a dull brownish colour, and that the snail was one of the kind that the Clugniac monks are said to have brought with them from France, when Roger the great Earl of Montgomery, brought over his band of monks from La Charité sur Loire, and founded his monastery at Wenlock soon after the Conquest. In the fourteenth and fifteenth century snails of this kind, "Escargots" as they were then termed, and still are called in France, were constantly used as a remedy "for restoring a right motion of the heart, and for casting out melancholy." A cure, it is said, was also wrought by a "cunning jelly" made from them, and this was supposed to be "proper" food for those who "dwindered" or who were "subject to a weak, or queasy stomach."