4 <I(AMBLES OF A VOtMINIS 



spot the background of the picture. Why, these things 

 are at his very door, and he has not seen them. He gets 

 his hat and stick, he whistles to his dog, and, with the 

 paper in his hand, he hurries up the well-known path 

 among the trees. A hundred times already has he 

 passed that way, but now he will see things with quite 

 different eyes. How strange that he never saw a 

 squirrel or a weasel, a gold-crest or a woodpecker. 



Full of hope and expectation he clatters up the stony 

 track, startling a voluble blackbird from the bush hard 

 by, and sending him headlong through the wood re- 

 peating his loud signal of alarm. And now he is at the 

 top of the path, having stopped once or twice to call up 

 the dog, who, in the full enjoyment of the chase, is 

 scattering in confusion all the inhabitants of the under- 

 wood. " Yes, this is the spot ; there is the old tree with 

 the bark torn away by the woodpecker;" and elated 

 with his success in having really got upon the track, he 

 cuts away with his stick a spray or two of briar with a 

 crack that might be heard a hundred yards. A squirrel 

 sitting quiet at his dinner on the level fir-bough over- 

 head drops his half -gnawed cone and crouches behind the 

 shelter of the branch. A woodpecker who was digging 

 for larvae in an old stump farther on retreats behind his 

 tree and watches motionless. A troop of tits and gold- 

 crests scatter from the neighbouring tree-tops, and a 

 complacent smack on the newspaper is answered by a 

 watchful wren, whose shrill rattle sets every feathered 

 neighbour on the alert. 



Yes, this is the place ; but where are the birds ? He 



