THROUGH THE YEAR 151 



ful they are ! I go a journey of 200 miles once at 

 least each year to watch for a few days the drill of 

 the dunlins ; and of late I have forgotten the star- 

 ling aerial figures in my admiration of the dunlins. 

 But perhaps the starlings are equally good to see. 

 There is the same opening out and closing in of the 

 flock, the same hanging in the air a sort of dead- 

 point in flight. There is the same utter absence of 

 confusion. 



They do not seem to be so gloriously swift as 

 dunlins can be, and I may miss that phase when the 

 dunlins suddenly swerve off from the strand and 

 dash out to sea, as if they were creatures of the sea, 

 not the land, cutting along just above the white- 

 tipped waves ; and I may miss, in the starling drill, 

 that constant lovely alternation of light and dark 

 when the wheeling, curving flock changes its plane 

 of wing, and the light flashes on that change. 



I may miss the scene, too, of the dunlin exercise, 

 the harbour, and its mud-flats and oozes, and the 

 gorse common and old beaches one rising above 

 another, and the great expanse of open sea. Yet 

 the starling drill is done in a scene great of its kind, 

 too. London has at least a few sky and landscapes 

 of grave beauty and of fine colour at this time. 

 Take St. James's Park seen from the upper part of a 

 house on its north side, the time near sunset in 

 the second half of October. On a sky whose lower 

 ground tint is largely indeterminate, a whitish blue 

 perhaps, wine-coloured fragments of cirro-stratus 

 cloud drift quickly, and among them are fragments 



