CHAPTER XL 



THE ''BLOOD" LINNET 



At the end of April linnet-land is sweet with the voices of 

 nesting linnets — the new-comers from across the sea and 

 the home-abiding birds — for they paired early in April when 

 the king-cups were opening. The forest of flowering gorses 

 standing by a dike-side yellow with ragwort is splashed with 

 their droppings, the needley branches affording rafters for their 

 pretty nests. As you push your way through the prickly 

 gorse needles, clothes-tearing brambles, and long, dried, pale 

 grass stalks, startling a feeding hedge-rabbit, who with ears 

 laid back has been watching you ever since you entered the 

 tiny forest, you startle these lively scarlet-flecked birds. A 

 cock flies up with a piece of wool in his beak ; a little further 

 on another cock sits watchfully on a bramble spray against 

 the loke, his bill full of flaxen gladen, down which he at once 

 dips, or sings on, and commences sedulously to rub his bill 

 against his shaking perch. 



Sitting in the white grasses, grey as the hair of an old 

 man, you get a peep of the russet marshes through a frame 

 of decorative gorse — the full dike gleaming in the spring 

 sunshine like the sun-embrowned face of a daughter of the 

 marshes, and away there by the budding trees the black 

 sprouting sallows resemble the fine pencilled markings on a 

 shell found on this greenish shore of the marshland sea. As 

 you sit silently in the cool undershadow you can hear the 

 busy linnets coming and going, singing their flute-like notes 

 as they dive off into the loke to search for building material. 

 And if you watch patiently you may see many a pair go to 



