The hen-harrier skims to and fro along the roadside ditches, but he is a wary and cautious fowl, and is never within gunshot of the road when a man comes down that way. The merlin, that beautiful miniature falcon, glides swift and low across the moors and meadows, flashes suddenly over the roadside dyke, and before the small birds have time to realize that their enemy is upon them, he is gone again—only a little puff of feathers floating slowly down the air showing where he struck his prey. The peregrine wheels high overhead, but is too proud and shy a bird to hunt upon man’s roads. Nor has the road any charm for the raven, who goes croaking hoarsely over it on his way from shore to hill. The little short-eared owls hide all day among the heather near our road, and come flapping up in the gloaming on noiseless wings to take their share of its good things. In the treeless islands the kestrel is not the only bird that sits upon the wires. There the starling sings his weird love song, mingling with his own harsh notes the calls of every other bird that the islands know; and the buntings chant their lugubrious and monotonous ditties there. The telegraph wires are not the only mysterious works of man which have disturbed and interfered with the feathered life so near to and yet so far apart from his. What a mystery must he be to those fellow-creatures who watch him, with his continual scratching and patching of the breast of kindly Mother Earth! Not wholly does he yield the road to them between sunset and sunrise; but when he goes abroad in the dark it is often in the guise of a rumbling dragon with great eyes of flame. Once, to the writer’s knowledge, a gannet swooped down in valiant ignorance on such a horrid creature of the night. He flashed suddenly, white out of the darkness, into the circle of light of a doctor’s gig lamps. That bold bird his fellows saw no more; and one may fancy that with his disappearance a new terror was added to the fiery-eyed creatures that roam the roads by night. He died, though not without a fierce fight for his life; and his skin, cunningly filled out with wire and straw, stands under a glass case in his slayer’s home even unto this day. It is in spring and summer that the road sets forth its choicest lures for its lovers, yet even in “winter and rough weather” it has its beauties for the seeing eye. The puddles and cart-ruts shine like dull silver when the clouds are heavy and gray overhead. When the rain cloud blows over and the sky clears, these same shallow pools and channels gleam with a cold, clear blue, more exquisite than that of the heavens they reflect; and at night the stars besprinkle them with diamonds. Again,— “Autumnal frosts enchant the pool, And make the cart-ruts beautiful.”