WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS. 137 



another cloud descends beyond it, a very mist and 

 vapour as it were of wings. It makes one wonder to 

 think where all the nests could have been ; there could 

 hardly have been enough eaves and barns for all these 

 to have been bred in. Every one of the multitude has 

 a keen pair of eyes and a hungry beak, and every single 

 individual finds something to eat in the stubble. Some- 

 thing that was not provided for them, crumbs that have 

 escaped from this broad table, and there they are every 

 day for weeks together, still finding food. If you will 

 consider the incredible number of little mouths, and the 

 busy rate at which they ply them hour by hour, you 

 may imagine what an immense number of grains of 

 wheat must have escaped man's hand, for you must 

 remember that every time they peck they take a whole 

 grain. Down, too, come the grey-blue wood-pigeons and 

 the wild turtle-doves. The singing linnets come in 

 parties, the happy greenfinches, the streaked yellow- 

 hammers, as if any one had delicately painted them in 

 separate streaks, and not with a wash of colour, the 

 brown buntings, chaffinches out they come from the 

 hazel copses, where the nuts are dropping, and the hedge 

 berries turning red, and every one finds something to his 

 liking. There are the seeds of the charlock and the 

 thistle, and a hundred other little seeds, insects, and 

 minute atom-like foods it needs a bird's eye to know. 

 They are never still, they sweep up into the hedges and 

 line the boughs, calling and talking, and away again to 

 another rood of stubble without any order or plan of 

 search, just sowing themselves about like wind-blown 

 seeds. Up and down the day through with a zest never 

 failing. It is beautiful to listen to them and watch them, 

 if any one will stay under an oak by the nut-tree 

 boughs, where the dragon-flies shoot to and fro in the 



