The breeding-change that may be seen even before Christmas, the January stir that becomes so obvious a week or so, or any day, after the New Year is come, here and now we are at the turn of the year. By mid-January, even, here and there, the song-thrush and the missel may have begun to build, and even the great-tit’s bell may tinkle in the coppice or wind-spared russet oak-glade. Already the snowdrop and the Christmas-rose, the green-white aconite and the pale winter-iris are become old acquaintances: many a primrose may have adventured in shy retreats: any day a wandering minstrel will spill a tinkle of music from among the first yellow spray of hazel catkins, the hedgesparrow may unloosen song under the early-opening woodbine-buds, the corn-bunting may crack his fairy-hammer or the wren try his new-year flute among the yellowing gorse: any day, at the sight of the first nomad daisies or the first gay vagrant dandelion, the yellow-hammer may become a lover and a poet. It is this unchanging ‘any-day’ element that redeems even the longest and dreariest midwinter; the sense of the ever-moving ichor in the eternal veins; the inward exultation at the ever-quickening and ever-slowing, but never-ceasing fans of life and death. Yesterday, rain-fog; to-day, frost-mist. But how fascinating each. How vast and menacing the familiar oaks looked, leaning gigantic over dim lapsing hedgerows. How phantom-like and processional, the elms stealing into view one after the other; the birches disclosing tresses wet with dews from the secret woods they are gliding from to regain the secret lands beyond the misty river where I can hear the mallard call, like a sudden tocsin among the falling towers and silent avalanches of Cloudland. It is desolate here, where I stand. “_Cinnidh feanntag’s a ghàradh ’N uair thig faillinn ’san ròs_” “_Nettles grow in the garden, While the roses decay._” A long way off yet till the wood-thrush rings his falling chime from the April-Tree or French-Broom, as the laburnum is called in some parts of the Highlands. I know a wood where a great _Bealaidh Fhrangach_ sleeps, to awake months hence in sun-gold beauty. The wood-thrush will be its flute. Already I have to-day cut a slip from a garden-laburnum, for a friend who wants ‘a flute of the April-Tree’ (_feadan na Craobh Abraon_) ... for there is no timber better for the whistlewood of the bagpipe than this. And what more fit for the Strayed Pan, if perchance he follow the Phantom Call in the Hills of the North? But see ... the mist has gone like a haze from blue water. I hear starling-music over yonder in the _Talamh nan Ramh_, as Ossian calls the Country of the Woods. _The Flute of the April-Tree_, and snow at my feet! ‘The Flute of the April-Tree’: it has the yellow and white magic of spring in it. THE SONS OF THE NORTH WIND