48 Idylls of the Field. 



High up in the rocking tops all day the birds are 

 working, repairing a foundation here, making good a 

 breach there, now putting fresh touches to the lining. 



Every moment arrives a party of foragers, greeted 

 with new clamour from their friends at home, who 

 recognise far-off their mates among the dusky crowd. 



Wheeling on broad wings across the wind that drives 

 the white clouds fast across the pale blue overhead, 

 the great birds bring home their plunder. 



Here comes one grasping in his beak a stick so long 

 and heavy that he can scarcely reach his nest. 

 Another carries to his mate a seed-potato plundered 

 from some newly-planted field. 



The solemn caws of dignified citizens mingle with 

 the sharper clamour of irreverent youth; some are 

 hoarse from age or temper; while one bird, whose 

 vocal organs have perhaps been damaged in that 

 baptism of fire that yearly waits the hapless young, 

 utters a cry like the shriek of a sea-gull. 



There seems to be the slenderest idea of the rights 

 of property among the members of the commonwealth. 



Now one bird, leaving his own nest where he has 

 been honestly at work for the last ten minutes, sidles 

 up to another — the property, probably, of a newly- 

 married pair who have yet to learn the ways of their 

 friends and neighbours — seizes a handful of the lining 

 that has taken so much trouble to collect, and then 

 scrambles off across the branches to make use of his 

 ill-gotten gains in his own abode. And when one of 



