156 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



attitudes about the bark made him a charming picture. 

 These birds had a way of diving headlong with furled 

 wings from a higher to a lower branch, dropping like 

 a stone through the air and alighting with the utmost 

 grace and ease. What a plodder the tree-creeper is 

 beside them ! The rooks were shouting away by their 

 nests, bowing their heads, spread-eagling their tails, 

 flying, floating and scrambling in a ferment of excite- 

 ment. Repairing operations had begun, and I must 

 have been mistaken about the vote. Little did those 

 ingenuous, trusting rooks know that the housing question 

 was not to be settled for many a grey and blustering 

 day. 



December 3rd. I set out, and within a hundred yards 

 blundered through the Looking-Glass. On the roof 

 of a cow-byre a wagtail minced, pranced and twirled, 

 while the mate flung himself or herself through space 

 like some airy, miniature dolphin of a rarer element 

 than its own. Blue, cole and great tits shone sky- 

 blue, grey, buff and black against the dark gloss of 

 ivy-draped thorns and hollies. In the tree above my 

 head a bullfinch dipped his old-rose-red breast, bowed 

 his lustrous black head and tilted his blue-grey back 

 over some " daintie dish " invisible to me. Blackbirds 

 chuckled in the hedge ; sparrows and chaffinches poked 

 out their chests on the hawthorns ; a nuthatch pried 

 about the bark of an ash near by ; robin was in fullest 

 song, sprinkling coloured jets of sound into the still, 

 grey atmosphere; and a roving band of fieldfares took 

 the sky with powerful wings overhead. One tells it 

 all in plodding sequence, but it happened simultaneously 

 and vanished with the breath of pleasure one spent 

 upon it. 



Thence I wandered into the fields and watched the 

 tits, sparrows, finches and buntings, feeding from the 

 remains of a corn-stack. There were four yellow-hammers 

 and a pair of corn-buntings on a small ash five yards 

 away, and the brilliant yellows of the hammers shone 

 and glowed against the neutral tints of earth and sky. 

 It is when we get close to our native birds that we 

 realize that their sober sheen is an illusion of distance. 



