ROUND A LONDON COPSE 143 



the elms never cease love-making; and love-making 

 needs much soft talking. A nightingale in a bush 

 sings so loud the hawthorn seems too small for the 

 vigour of the song. He will let you stand at the very 

 verge of the bough ; but it is too near, his voice is 

 sweeter across the field. 



There are still, in October, a few red apples on the 

 boughs of the trees in a little orchard beside the same 

 road. It is a natural orchard left to itself therefore 

 there is always something to see in it. The palings 

 by the road are falling, and are held up chiefly by the 

 brambles about them and the ivy that has climbed up. 

 Trees stand on the right and trees on the left; there 

 is a tall spruce fir at the back. 



The apple trees are not set in straight lines : they 

 were at first, but some have died away and left an 

 irregularity ; the trees lean this way and that, and they 

 are scarred and marked as it were with lichen and moss. 

 It is the home of birds. A blackbird had its nest 

 this spring in the bushes on the left side, a nightingale 

 another in the bushes on the right, and there the night- 

 ingale sang under the shadow of a hornbeam for hours 

 every morning while "City" men were hurrying past 

 to their train. 



The sharp relentless shrike that used to live by the 

 copse moved up here, and from that very hornbeam 

 perpetually darted across the road upon insects in the 

 fern and furze opposite. He never entered the orchard ; 

 it is often noticed that birds (and beasts of prey) do not 

 touch creatures that build near their own nests. Several 

 thrushes reside in the orchard; swallows frequently 

 twittered from the tops of the apple trees. As the grass 

 is so safe from intrusion, one of the earliest buttercups 

 flowers here. Bennets the flower of the grass come 



