250 Flying Home. 



the roosting- trees, fully a mile and a half literally 

 as the crow flies ; and backwards in the opposite direc- 

 tion the line reaches as far as the eye can see. It is 

 safe to estimate that the aerial army's line of march 

 extends over quite five miles in one unbroken corps. 

 The breadth they occupy in the atmosphere varies 

 now twenty yards, now fifty, now a hundred, on an 

 average say fifty yards ; but rooks do not fly very 

 close together like starlings, and the mass, it may be 

 observed, fly on the same plane. Instead of three 

 or four layers one above the other, the greater number 

 pass by at the same height from the ground, side by 

 side on a level, as soldiers would march upon a road : 

 not meaning, of course, an absolute, but a relative 

 level. This formation is more apparent from an ele- 

 vation as it were, up among them than from 

 below ; and looking along their line towards the 

 distant wood it is like glancing under a black canopy. 



Small outlying parties straggle from the line 

 now on one side, now on the other ; sometimes a few 

 descend to alight on trees in the meadows, where 

 doubtless their nests were situated in the spring. 

 For it is a habit of theirs, months after the nesting 

 is over and also before it begins, to pay a flying visit 

 to the trees in the evening, calling en route to see that 

 all is well and to assert possession. 



The rustling sound of these thousands upon thou- 

 sands of wings beating the air with slow steady 

 stroke can hardly be compared to any thing else in its 

 weird oppressiveness, so to say : it is a little like fall- 

 ing water, but may be best likened, perhaps, to a 

 vast invisible broom sweeping the sky. Every now 

 and then a rook passes with ragged wing several 



