APRIL. 103 



of earth. If you discover and take them up, they 

 continue motionless. If you lay them down, they 

 retain the posture you may happen to place them 

 in ; and although you hide yourself from their view, 

 they will rigidly maintain the same inanimate atti- 

 tude while the old birds continue their soaring aloft, 

 and their cries, though it were for a day. The mo- 

 ment the parent birds alight, they lift up their heads 

 and run cheerfully about. 



Here I must stop : were I to proceed to the lake 

 and the reedy marsh, to the large flaggy nests of the 

 water-hen, the coot, the wild duck and goose, the 

 snipe, the plover, etc., I might write a volume : yet 

 all and each, in material, in curious construction, in 

 colour of the eggs, in picturesqueness of situation, 

 have distinguishing characteristics, strongly marked 

 by that hand of varied and exhaustless beauty which 

 has constructed so wonderfully the whole world, and 

 to all the myriads of living creatures has given so 

 peculiar a difference of figure, habits, and disposi- 

 tion. 



April is so called from the Latin Aprilis, which 

 is derived from Aperire, to open. The allusion is 

 obvious. The Saxons called it Osier or Easter- 

 monalh, from the feast of the goddess Eastre. 



The following description of this season of the 

 year is by Gawain Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, as 

 modernized by Dr. Warton : 



" Fresh Aurora, the wife of Tithonus, issued from 



