i o Spring 



with foot and knee as well as with one hand while 

 you try to take the angry, strong-billed, biting, beau- 

 tiful-eyed fledglings with the other. And your 

 nerves are not at all composed by the old birds either ; 

 for, shrieking aloud and with open bills, they swoop past 

 and past you till your cheeks feel the fanning of their 

 wings, and you fear for your eyes. But if you are 

 worth your salt, you do not give it up till you have 

 flung down the quarry to be reared at home. If, as 

 usually happens, there are four or five young ones in 

 the nest, you leave the parents some that they may 

 not be utterly disconsolate. But should there only be 

 eggs, then these are left alone, for there is nothing 

 against the hernsheugh, and in spite of what is often 

 said to the contrary he is probably increasing and 

 multiplying. 



It is not every day, however, that a heron's nest 

 is found, and but for this one your ramble would have 

 inevitably ended in the Dene, which seems to have 

 been created to be the grave of sunny afternoons. 

 Even the old women who gather sticks for firewood 

 there love it they know not why far better than 

 any place besides, while all wild creatures for miles 

 round make it their home, and its wild flowers are 

 famous near and far. It is as if an enormous plough 

 had cleft the soil, and made a furrow a hundred feet 

 deep, every stone on the steep slopes of it circled by 

 a summer procession of wild flowers. Wild hyacinths 

 are gathered there and lilies of the valley, violets, 



