By this time the neatherd by Loch Ken and the shepherd among the wilds of Kirkcudbright, like their kin from the Sussex downs, to the last _sliabh_ or _maol_ in Sutherland, may repeat the rhyme with safety. ‘The worst o’t ’s over.’ For to-day the curlews cry above the moors, the whimbrel’s warning note echoes down the long sands o’ Solway, and everywhere, from the salt bent by the coasts to the loneliest inlands, the lapwing wails. The Tribe of the Plover is in the land once more, and so Spring is with us. Not, perhaps, the Spring of the poets, who look (as Ailil in the old Celtic tale) under boughs of white blossom to where the sunlight moves like a fawn of gold in a windless land, where the songs of birds turn to flowers, and where flowers change in the twilights of dawn into singing birds. Not thus does Spring come to us in the north. The black-headed gull screaming on the east wind, restless before his long flight to the wilderness and the grassy homes of the mating season: the hoodie-crow, weary of the south, heard on grey mornings when sleet whips the uplands: the troubled fieldfares, eager for lands oversea: the curlews crying along the Anglian fens and lamenting over Solway Moss: the mallard calling to his mate in the chill waters: the shadow of harrier and peregrine from Surrey upland to the long braes of Lammermuir--these, rather, are the signals of our bleak northern Spring. What though the song-thrush and the skylark have long sung, though the wheatear and chiff-chaff have been late in coming, though the first swallows have not had the word passed on by the woodpecker, and somewhere in the glens of Greece and Sicily the cuckoo lingers? How often the first have called _Spring_ to us, and, while we have listened, the wind has passed from the south to the north and the rains have become sleet or snow: how often the missel-thrush has rung-in the tides of blossom, and the woods have but grown darker with gloom of the east while the first yellow clans along the hedgerows have been swept by hail. How often, again, the wind of the west has been fragrant with cowslip and ox-eye, with daffodil and wallflower, with the pungent growing-odours of barberry and butcher’s-broom and the unloosening larch, when, indeed, the sallow-blooms have put on their gold, and the green woodpecker is calling his love-notes in the copses, and yet the delaying swallow has not been seen north of the Loire or where the Loiny winds between Moret and the woods of Fontainebleau? How often the wild-rose has moved in first-flame along the skirts of hornbeam-hedge or beech-thicket, or the honeysuckle begun to unwind her pale horns of ivory and moongold, and yet across the furthest elm-tops to the south the magic summons of the cuckoo has been still unheard in the windless amber dawn, or when, as in the poet’s tale, the myriad little hands of Twilight pull the shadows out of the leaves and weave the evening dark. But when the cry of the plover is abroad we know that