226 The Return of Song 



ringing song of the chaffinches is also occasionally 

 to be heard in September, on days when the mingled 

 warmth and freshness in the air seem to stir a 

 sense of April in their blood. But autumn chaffinch- 

 songs are much rarer than autumn primroses, and 

 even the birds which call in the September garden 

 with the native music of spring are seldom heard 

 again till the lengthening days of February. More 

 familiar and characteristic of warm autumn 

 weather, after the in-gathering of the harvest, is 

 the gentle music of the linnets, that now traverse 

 the country in their free winter flocks. After 

 the corn is carried, and before the land is cleaned 

 and sown, parties of these gentle finches are a 

 constant feature of the landscape in any country 

 of large arable lands. They spend much time in 

 searching the stubbles and root-fields for the seeds 

 of the cornfield weeds on which at this time of 

 the year they chiefly live. But the quest for a 

 living is easy in these golden autumn days, when the 

 dun stubbles sleep for leagues beneath the sun ; and, 

 when the linnets come to one of the tall, straggling 

 hedges of the cornlands, where their kind will 

 nest in mid-April, they love to halt in the upper 

 boughs of the thorns and clematis -wreathed hazels, 

 and to utter a little murmuring song of peace, of 

 which the united volume fills the spaces of still 

 autumn sunshine. Of all the birds* autumn music, 

 there is none that realizes so fully the sense of the 

 completed year, which is expressed to the eye by 

 the landscape of wide, reaped fields. Now, as 

 always, nature is dying and being born ; and, 



