mistletoe in the old shaggy apple tree at the entrance of the coombe the blackbird sings, composing phrases all the sweeter for being strangely like some in the songs that countrymen used to sing. Earth has no dearer voice than his when it is among the chilly rain at the end of the light. All day there have been blue skies and parading white clouds, and no wind, with sudden invasions of violent wind and hail or rain, followed by perfected calm and warmer sun--sun which lures the earliest tortoise-shell butterfly to alight on the footworn flints in the path up the coombe. At last the sky seems securely blue above the hangers and a clear small star or two pricks through it. But, emerging from the coombe, whose sides shut out half the heavens, you see that the west has wonderfully ordered and dressed itself with pale sky and precipitous, dark, modelled clouds and vague woods, and above them the new moon. The blackbirds sing, the dim Downs proceed, and the last shower’s drops glitter on the black boughs and pallid primroses. Why should this ever change? At the time it seems that it can never change. A wide harmony of the brain and the earth and the sky has begun, when suddenly darker clouds are felt to have ascended out of the north-west and to have covered the world. The beeches roar with rain. Moon and Downs are lost. The road bubbles and glows underfoot. A distant blackbird still sings hidden in the bosom of the rain like an enchanter hidden by his spells.... It is April now, and when it is still dark in the woods and hedges the birds all sing together and the maze of song is dominated by the owl’s hoot--like a full moon of sound above myriad rippling noises. Every day a new invader takes possession of the land. The wryneck is loud and persistent, never in harmony with other birds, a complete foreigner, and yet the ear is glad of his coming. He is heard first, not in the early morning, along a grove of oaks; and the whole day is his. Then on every hand the gentle willow wrens flit and sing in the purple ash blossoms. The martins, the swallows, have each a day. One day, too, is the magpie’s: for he sits low near his mate in a thicket and chatters not aloud but low and tenderly, almost like the sedgewarbler, adding a faint plaintive note like the bullfinch’s, and fragments as of the linnet’s song, and chirrupings; disturbed, he flies away with chatter as hoarse as ever. The rooks reign several days. They have a colony in a compact small oval beech wood that stands in a hollow amidst dry grey ploughland; and from the foxy-red summits of the trees, in the most genial hot day, their cawings are loud and mellow and warm as if they were the earth’s own voice; and all the while the dew is sliding along the branches, dropping into other drops or to the ground as the birds flutter at their nests, and from time to time one triple drop catches the sun and throbs where it hangs like Hesperus among the small stars.