88 THE RING OF NATURE 



Now, there flies up from the grass where the pale 

 green cowslips are opening their honey-yellow 

 petals a bird that seems bent on reaching blue 

 heaven itself. Sixty feet up in the air it stops, 

 bends its back till it seems like to break, makes 

 parachutes of its wings and tail, and comes spirally 

 down to its starting-place in a flood of perfectly 

 ecstatic silvery music. That bird is the winter- 

 moping meadow-pipit. 



Down the road is an ash tree that I like to watch 

 daily every April, till some morning it keeps mir- 

 aculous rendezvous with a bird that has wintered 

 in the south. Ah, there at last he is. Something 

 tells me that it is he, sitting on the same twig of 

 the same bough that he occupied last April, but 

 when he goes up into the air I am joyfully quite 

 certain of him. Up, up, he goes, then apparently 

 dislocates his back and comes down on umbrella 

 wings, singing, singing, singing till he reaches 

 again the self -same twig from which he started. 

 Apparently the same bird again as the winter- 

 moping meadow-pipit, but this is the tree-pipit, 

 constant to the habit of sky-rocketing from a 

 tree instead of from the ground, and preferring to 

 winter gaily in the south rather than moon about 

 an English dunghill. 



The bird that often seems the most beautiful 

 of all is only seen in some southern counties on 

 its way to the north. It is only thus that the 

 redstart is seen in many places that seem eminently 

 suited to the bird, but which, nevertheless, cannot 



