THE END OF WINTER 31 



sing, the dim Downs proceed, and the last shower's drops 

 gh'tter on the black boughs and pallid primroses. Why 

 should this ever change? At the time it seems that it 

 can never change. A wide harmony of the brain and 

 the earth and the sky has begun, when suddenly darker 

 clouds are felt to have ascended out of the north-west and 

 to have covered the world. The beeches roar with rain. 

 Moon and Downs are lost. The road bubbles and glows 

 underfoot. A distant blackbird still sings hidden in the 

 bosom of the rain like an enchanter hidden by his 

 spells. . . . 



It is April now, and when it is still dark in the woods 

 and hedges the birds all sing together and the maze of 

 song is dominated by the owl's hoot — like a full moon of 

 sound above myriad rippling noises. Every day a new 

 invader takes possession of the land. The wryneck is 

 loud and persistent, never in harmony with other birds, a 

 complete foreigner, and yet the ear is glad of his coming. 

 He is heard first, not in the early morning, along a grove 

 of oaks; and the whole day is his. 



Then on every hand the gentle willow wrens flit and 

 sing in the purple ash blossoms. The martins, the 

 swallows, have each a day. One day, too, is the mag- 

 pie's : for he sits low near his mate in a thicket and 

 chatters not aloud but low and tenderly, almost like the 

 sedgewarbler, adding a faint plaintive note like the bull- 

 finch's, and fragments as of the linnet's song, and chirrup- 

 ings; disturbed, he flies away with chatter as hoarse as 

 ever. 



The rooks reign several days. They have a colony in 

 a compact small oval beech wood that stands in a hollow 



