Day by day the wind-wings lifted a more multitudinous whisper from the woodlands. The deep hyperborean note, from the invisible ocean of air, was still audible: within the concourse of bare boughs which wrought against it, that surging voice could not but have an echo of its wintry roar. In the sun-havens, however, along the southerly copses, in daisied garths of orchard-trees, amid the flowering currant and guelder and lilac bushes, in quiet places where the hives were all a-murmur, the wind already sang its lilt of Spring. From dawn till noon, from an hour before sundown till the breaking foam along the wild-cherry flushed fugitively because of the crimson glow out of the west, there was a ceaseless chittering of birds. The starlings and the sparrows enjoyed the commune of the homestead; the larks and fieldfares and green and yellow linnets congregated in the meadows, where, too, the wild bee already roved. Among the brown ridgy fallows there was a constant flutter of black, white-gleaming, and silver-grey wings, where the stalking rooks, the jerking peewits, and the wary, uncertain gulls from the neighbouring sea feasted tirelessly from the teeming earth. Often, too, the wind-hover, that harbinger of the season of the young broods, quivered his curved wings in his arrested flight, while his lance-like gaze penetrated the whins beneath which a new-born rabbit crawled, or discerned in the tangle of a grassy tuft the brown watchful eyes of a nesting quail. In the remoter woodlands the three foresters of April could be heard; the woodpecker tapping on the gnarled boles of the oaks, the wild dove calling in low crooning monotones to his silent mate, the cuckoo tolling his infrequent peals from skiey belfries built of sun and mist. In the fields, where the thorns were green as rivulets of melted snow and the grass had the bloom of emerald, and the leaves of docken, clover, cinquefoil, sorrel, and a thousand plants and flowers, were wave-green, the ewes lay, idly watching with their luminous amber eyes the frisking and leaping of the close-curled, tuft-tailed, woolly-legged lambs. In corners of the hedgerows, and in hollows in the rolling meadows, the primrose, the celandine, the buttercup, the dandelion, and the daffodil spilled little eddies of the sunflood which overbrimmed them with light. All day long the rapture of the larks filled the blue air with vanishing spirals of music, swift and passionate in the ascent, repetitive and less piercing in the narrowing downward gyres. From every whin the poignant monotonous note of the yellow hammer re-echoed. Each pastoral hedge was alive with robins, chaffinches, and the dusky shadows of the wild mice darting here and there among the greening boughs.