James seemed, on the whole, rather better than earlier in the day. The most ominous thing he did was to begin a long incoherent discourse about the rooks which kept circling over their heads on their way to the tall trees of Wild Pine. But this particular event of the rooks’ return to their Nevilton roosting-place was a phase of the local life of that spot calculated to impress even perfectly sane minds with romantic suggestion. It was always a sign of the breaking up of the year’s pristine bloom when they came, a token of the not distant approach of the shorter equinoctial days. They flew hither, these funereal wayfarers, from far distant feeding-grounds. They did not nest in the Nevilton woods. Nevilton was to them simply a habitation of sleep. Many of them never even saw it, except in its morning and evening twilight. The place drew them to it at night-fall, and rejected them at sunrise. In the interval they remained passive and unconscious--huddled groups of black obscure shapes, tossed to and fro in their high branches, their glossy heads full of dreams beyond the reach of the profoundest sage. Before settling down to rest, however, it was their custom, even on the stormiest evenings, to sweep round, above the roofs of the village, in wide airy circles of restless flight, uttering their harsh familiar cries. Sailing quietly on a peaceful air or roughly buffeted by rainy gusts of wind--those westerly winds that are so wild and intermittent in this corner of England--these black tribes of the twilight give a character to their places of favourite resort which resembles nothing else in the world. The cawing of rooks is like the crying of sea-gulls. It is a sound that more than anything flings the minds of men back to “old unhappy far-off things.” The troubled soul of the luckless stone-carver went tossing forth on this particular night of embalmed stillness, driven in the track of those calmly circling birds, on the gust of a thought-tempest more formidable than any that the fall of the leaves could bring. But the devoted passion of the younger brother followed patiently every flight it took; and by the time they had reached the vicarage-gate, and turned down the station-hill towards their lodging, the wild thoughts had fallen into rest, and like the birds in the dusk of their sheltering branches, were soothed into blessed forgetfulness. Luke had recourse, before they reached their dwelling, to the magic of old memories; and the end of that unforgettable day was spent by the two brothers in summoning up childish recollections, and in evoking the images and associations of their earliest compacts of friendship.