THE LONELIER HOURS 



33 



timidity which they display towards mankind later in the 

 day. They gaze at him indifferently, and are little disposed 

 to give him room. The yellowhammer goes on tracing his 

 golden semi-circles about his hen ; thrushes stare from the 

 middle of the road as if they were half ready to break out in 

 noisy abuse, but preferred to treat the intrusion with silent 

 dignity ; and shyer birds appear so numerously about the 

 road and hedges as to give a new realisation of their 

 fugitive and elusive lives in the hours when man is king. 

 Even the shy hare on its way back from the 

 cottage garden looks twice and three times at 

 the rare apparition before deciding that it must 

 be a man ; and the wilder stoat, which will 

 sometimes attack a man in defence of its young 

 by broad daylight, gazes at him in the hour of 

 dawn with the true look of the wild animal 

 half insolence and half sheer bloodthirstiness. 

 All this hostility and indifference on the part 

 of the familiar beasts and birds of an English 

 village gives a curious jar to man's instinctive 

 sense of his own predominance. We have only 

 to get up three or four hours before breakfast to 

 find a world in which we are still of small account ; and it is 

 positively comforting to human self-esteem to find a friendly 

 welcome from the old cart-horses in the pasture, pushing 

 their hairy faces over the palings and expecting to be led off 

 to work for their masters. At least we have tamed the 

 horse if we are flouted by the common jenny-wren. 



The first note of summer verging towards harvest-time 

 is heard in the stillness of the June night, when the green 

 horse-chestnut or tassel of plane-seeds falls to earth with a 

 single sudden tap. Though the unripe seed falls with a 

 miniature sound, there is the warning of all autumn in it. 



