The second of the three happenings belongs to the moorland. Up on the high moors, where there is a broad flat place with a little marshy pond in it, the Elf and the Imp have a few very special friends. There are the curlews, with their speckly brown bodies and long thin beaks and whistling screams, and the grouse who make a noise like an old clock running down in a hurry when they leap suddenly into the air. But these are not the favourites. The birds that the Imp and the Elf love best of all on the moorland have a beautiful crest on the tops of their heads, and they are clothed in white and dark green that looks like black from a little way off. They cry pe-e-e-e-wi, pe-e-e-e-e-wi, and the Imp cries "peewit" back to them. Some people call them plovers, and some people call them lapwings, because of the way they fly, but we always call them the "peewits." All through the spring and summer they are there, and it is great fun to watch them, for they love to fly into the air and turn somersaults, and throw themselves about as if they were in a circus, just for fun, you know, and because it is jolly to be alive. But in the Autumn many of the birds do strange things. Some, like the swallows and martins, fly far away over the seas to warmer countries for the winter. Some only come here to spend the winter months, living in cooler countries through the summer. And the peewits, when Autumn comes, collect in tremendous flocks. All the friends and relations of our peewits on the moor seem to come and join them, and then they move away all over the country from place to place, wherever they can get food. When we go up to the moor just at this time, we see not two or three or half-a-dozen peewits, but crowds and crowds of them flying low, and strutting on the ground, with their crests high up over their heads. The last of the three happenings is the saddest. Do you remember the haymaking and what the hay was carted away for? You remember how the farmers stored it to feed the cows in winter. At the end of the Autumn comes an evening when the cows are driven home for milking, and do not go back again. The fields are left empty all the Winter, while the red and white cows are fastened up in the byre (a byre is a nice name for a cowshed) to eat the hay. When that day comes the Imp and the Elf always walk home from the fields with the cows, and pat them and say good-bye to them at the door of the byre, and promise to come and visit them during the Winter. And then they come home to the house, and knock sadly on the door of my study, and come in and say, "Ogre, the cows have been shut up for the Winter, and nurse says we are to begin our thicker things to-morrow." And then we are all sad, for that means Winter. And I have to tell all sorts of jolly stories of King Frost and the Snow Queen before we are cheerful enough to go to bed. IV WINTER