“When daisies go”—and of all roadside blossoms they linger latest and reappear earliest (I have seen them lifting their modest crimson-tipped heads in December and opening their yellow eyes before the coltsfoot stars begin to shine)—but even when they are gone the gray stone dykes have still a glory of green moss, of gray and golden lichens. When all the land is soaked and sodden with heavy rains, the road, where it climbs that low brown hill, will suddenly shine out across the intervening miles like a sword flung down among the heather. When the winter rains have given place to the first snowfall of the year, go out early in the morning, before hoofs and wheels have blotted out the traces of the night, and you shall learn, as nothing else save long and close observation can teach you, how great is the nocturnal traffic of birds and beasts upon the road. Like fine lacework you shall find their footprints, to and fro, round and across, up the middle and down again. Hares and rabbits, rats and mice, gulls and plovers, thrushes and larks, water-hens and water-rails—these and many more have been busy here while you slept. And even now bright eyes are watching you, themselves unseen—those unsuspected eyes which are ever upon us as we follow the road on our daily round of duty or pleasure. Do they look on us with fear or wonder, with contempt or admiration, or with a mingling of all these feelings? That we can never know while the great barrier of silence stands between us and them. We blunder across their lives, doing them good and evil indiscriminately, but we understand them no more than they can understand us. Now in winter, new birds come to our road. Great flocks of snow-buntings, circling and wheeling with marvellous precision, at one moment almost invisible—a dim, brown, moving mist—and the next flashing a thousand points of silver to the level rays of the wintry sun. Scores of greenfinches, which we never see in summer, rise from the road edges to circle a little way and settle again. The “spink spink” of the chaffinch, also unknown to us in summer, may now be heard; fieldfares spring chuckling through the air far overhead, and red-winged thrushes hop among the stubbles. Down this shallow pass between the low hills come in the gloaming the lines of the wild swans, flying from the upland lochs to the sea. Their trumpet call rings far through the frosty air, and as we hear them there stir within us vague thoughts and dreams of the white north whence they came. As if answering the thought, the wet road shines with a new, faint, unearthly light, as flickering up the northern sky come the pale shifting streamers of the aurora borealis.