64 THE ROLL OF THE SEASONS 



and breast like a faintly silver-white cloud. His black 

 cap comes just below the eye, and there is a little bib 

 of black below his business-like beak of dark bluish- 

 green. How his keen eyes scan every branch of a 

 wild rose just breaking into tiny leaf! Now he is 

 hanging upside-down and inspecting a twig from 

 beneath ; now peering along the side of a promising 

 shoot ; now hammering at something suspicious he 

 has found in a fork. The tiny bunches of folded 

 leaves have each a meaning to him, and now and 

 then his keen bill snips off some egg of saw-fly, or 

 other trifle, and swallows it with a pinch of salad. 

 Possibly the mathematician would tell us that a moth's 

 egg is to the tit as the tit's egg would be to a man. 

 At any rate, our little friend has to work hard all day 

 in order to get a living, and he beats much the same 

 ground as many birds from over-sea will have to 

 search when they come. What a going over each 

 bush and tree must have before all these sharp bills 

 have done with them ! Yet a species of moth or fly 

 is scarcely ever exterminated, and in a very few weeks 

 there will be more aphides, caterpillars, grubs, and 

 miscellaneous pests than all our feathered friends will 

 know what to do with. 



Chaffinches are singing their canary-like song ; a 

 hedge-sparrow twitters sweetly and plaintively from 

 the top of a hazel ; farther off, two rival wood-pigeons 

 answer one another with placid defiance. Through 

 this soft web of sound, actual or ideal ears catch 

 something a little like the chime that a blacksmith 

 rings on his anvil. We brush cautiously through a 

 long tangle of wild guelder, spindle-wood, wayfarers'- 

 tree, and dog- wood, crushing under foot starry anemone 



