DECEMBER. 203 



is a song-thrush singing, not sotto voce, as you may 

 have heard him early in November from the middle 

 of some thicket, but sitting aloft in a bare oak and 

 casting his music on the air with something of the 

 generous confidence of spring. In the sheltered 

 corner of the stubble below, where several coveys of 

 partridges have assembled for their daily dust-bath, 

 there is already hot blood in the challenges which 

 the males are creakily casting at each other; and 

 when the coveys rise, as you appear at the gate, you 

 may notice that in the apparent disorder of their 

 whirring flight, pairs have a tendency to keep to- 

 gether. With the turn of the year, two partridges 

 cease to be a " brace " though they still hang up as 

 such in poulterers' shops and become a " pair" for 

 nature's purposes. 



PHEASANT AND WREN. 



The pheasants, too, that get up with metallic 

 clatter of vibrating quills from the shelter of the 

 corn-stacks where they have been pulling out the 

 straws, go off in manifest couples also ; for your 

 pheasant, polygamist as he is in the coverts, usually 

 has to be content with one wife in the fields. And 

 as you stand by the gate two wrens tiny feathered 

 atoms come whirring down the other side of the 

 hedge, scarcely a foot from the ground ; and one of 

 them suddenly pops up on the top of the gatepost, 

 and there, posing in half a dozen comical, cocktailed 

 attitudes, pours out the jubilant song that seems so 

 strangely strong and loud for so wee a singer. Then 

 he pops down again, as if he had tumbled off the 



