From Fox's Earth 



of moorland birds will go not to return, and calls 

 and flights once familiar will be no more seen or 

 heard. 



Of course, the villagers will not care : they 

 have not been taught to care. Their wants 

 are enough. For the rest, their ears are dull 

 that they do not hear, and their eyes that 

 they do not see. But, somehow, I think no loss 

 is without a gap. The stream by the cottage 

 door is no more than a trickle, save in flood time ; 

 but one would not like to be told that the tail of 

 the water had gone past, or to look on the dry 

 course. So with the stream of life. 



The old woman, framed in the little square 

 window, drops her stocking in her lap at that 

 plaintive moorland call. Perhaps she knows that 

 it comes from the bird of the golden coat with the 

 black breast. In her vague way it sets her 

 thinking it was so when she was a girl. At that 

 rippling whistle, after the blinds are drawn, she 

 gathers the children round her, in the candle light, 

 and tells them the story of the bird with the long 

 bent beak, that was made so because there is in 

 it something fateful. In this, or some other way, 

 is loss. 



The sum of many courses, by many villages, 

 legions of them, each village aiming at a course 

 of its own, will be very great indeed. Many 

 streams of life flowing one way in the spring, and 

 another in the autumn, and trickling throughout 



150 



