Within a fortnight the pigeons were beginning to lay, and as one of the nests contained the four useless eggs of an imbecile pair of hens, we tasted thus early the pleasure of blowing one egg in the orthodox manner and sucking three. This being Septuagesima Sunday, nothing would satisfy us but an immediate visit to Our Country, where the jays’ nests and others we had robbed seven months before were found with a thrill all but equal to that of May, and always strictly examined in case of accidents or miracles. For there had now been a whole week of spring sun shining on our hearts, and on the plumage of the cock pheasant we stalked in vain. The thrush sang. The blackbird sang. With the Conversion of St Paul came rain, and moreover school, Thucydides, Shakespeare’s “Richard the Second,” and other unrealities and afflictions, wherein I had to prove again how vain it is “to cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast” at old Gaunt’s command. But Quinquagesima Sunday meant rising in the dark and going out with Philip, to watch the jays, always ten yards ahead of our most stealthy stepping--to climb after old woodpigeons’ nests, to cut hazel sticks, to the tune of many skylarks. Alas, a sprained foot could not save me from school on Monday. But now the wild pigeons dwelling about the school began to coo all day long and to carry sticks for their nests. Out on the football field, in the bright pale light and the south-west wind the black rooks courted--and more; the jackdaws who generally accompanied them were absent somewhere. What then mattered it whether Henri Quatre or Louis Quatorze were the greatest of the Bourbon kings, as some of my school-fellows debated? Besides, when February was only half through, Aunt Rachel formally invited Philip and me to Lydiard Constantine for Easter. This broke the winter’s back. Frost and fog and Bright’s “History of England” were impotent. We began to write letters to the chosen three or four boys at Lydiard Constantine. We made, in the gas jets at Abercorran House, tubes of glass for the sucking of bird’s eggs. We bought egg drills. We made egg-drills for ourselves.... The cat had kittens. One pair of Higgs’ pigeons hatched out their eggs. The house-sparrows were building. The almond-trees blossomed in the gardens of “Brockenhurst” and the other houses. The rooks now stayed in the football field until five. The larks sang all day, invisible in the strong sun and burning sky. The gorse was a bonfire of bloom. Then, at last, on St David’s day, the rooks were building, the woodpigeons cooing on every hand, the first lambs were heard.