SIDE IvIGHTS ON BIRDS 



after painting on her canvas the vast spaces of 

 sky, sea, forest and field, paused in her work to 

 consider her colour schemes for the living creatures 

 which she had designed to give animation to her 

 pictures. In the paints still wet upon her palette 

 she found, ready to her hand, the exact hues 

 needed for her purpose. 



Thus when the sea had been completed, with its 

 greys and blues and foamy whites, she merely 

 touched again with a finer brush her unexhausted 

 colours, and lo : here a herring-gull or a kittiwake 

 appears, repeating with perfect fidelity each 

 delicate tint of blue and grey and the curving 

 whiteness of the foam beneath. In this con- 

 nection Mr. Thorburn writes, ' ' I have often been 

 struck with the repetition of the colours in a bird's 

 surroundings, in the colour of the bird itself, 

 when it can have nothing whatever to do with 

 protective colouring. In the eider drake, for 

 instance, a very showy bird, the tint of a sea- 

 green wave is curiously reproduced in the neck." 



Again Nature paints a breezy common. Masses 

 of yellow-flowered gorse, in irregular lines, extend 

 to the far background. Nearer at hand the tall 

 green bracken grows, and in the moister recesses, 

 the figwort, with its velvety topknot of flowers. 

 The general colour scheme is green, with vivid 

 touches of gold and red. Now a goldfinch 

 alights on a spray, and we see the velvety red 

 of the flower repeated on his cap, and the golden 

 glint of the gorse on his wing : or a greenfinch 

 hovers near, clad in the green hues of the bracken 

 with the tender yellow tint of the young shoots 

 on the primary feathers at his side. In all her 

 minuter and less obvious work, too. Nature uses 

 her familiar combinations of colour over and over 

 again. Examine carefully the little nook at the 

 fence side — the leaves from the taller trees have 

 drifted here, and they have mingled with the 



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