Well, the Song-Thrush has been ‘ready to laugh’ a good while back, now: his ‘laughter’ has already whirled the flute-notes of Spring, amid branches swelling to leaf-break, but not yet at the greening. The Chiff-Chaff has been heard on many a common, or on the ridge of a stone-dyke, or calling from the blackthorn thickets. The Wheatear has by this time delighted many a superstitious yokel who has caught his first glimpse of it sitting on a grassy tuft, or on a low spray of gorse or juniper, or depressed him sorely if he has come upon it for the first time when seen perched on a stone. But all three are birds which are with us long before the real Spring is come. With the missel-thrush on the elm-bole, the song-thrush in the copses, the blackbird calling from the evergreens, it does not follow, alas! that, as in the fairy-tale, the north wind has become a feeble old man and the east wind a silly old wife. Frost and snow and sleet, rain and flood, and the dull greyness of returned winter, may only too likely succeed these blithe heralds, have so succeeded, this year, as we know to our cost. There was jubilation in some places at January-end because of the early singing of the larks, which here and there had been heard soon after the New Year; but those who rejoiced untimely at the advent of spring-weather must have forgot the north-country proverb, ‘As long as the laverock sings before Candlemas it will greet after it.’ The lark and the blackbird are, in truth, such irresponsible singers, have such glad irrepressible hearts, that they will sing in the dead of winter, if only the wind slides through a windless air and the sunshine is unclouded. Tens of thousands have gone oversea, but thousands remain; and these are not to be chilled into silence if but the least excuse be given for the unsealing of the founts of joy. In green Decembers one may hear the merle’s notes fluting down the wet alleys as though Christmas were still a long way off; but the wary will recall another north-country saying akin to that just quoted concerning the laverock ... ‘When the blackbird sings before Christmas she will cry before Candlemas.’ So now I shall leave the Tribe of the Plover to a succeeding article, and, speaking of the skylark and his spring comrades, allude to that mysterious March wayfaring of the winged people which is so enthralling a problem in the psychology of bird-life.