THE COMING OF SPRING 267 



every day and often all day long, flock succeeding 

 flock as if they were all keeping in a line puffins, 

 razorbills, guillemots flying low on rapidly-beating 

 wings, their bodies showing black and white just 

 above the rough surface of the sea. More interesting 

 than these in appearance are those dusky-winged 

 swifts of the ocean, the shearwaters, travellers the 

 same way, not in flocks but singly and in twos and 

 threes and sometimes as many as half a dozen, all 

 keeping wide apart, searching the sea as they go, 

 moving very swiftly above the water in a series of 

 wide curves looking like shadows of birds passing, 

 invisible, far up in the sky. Sometimes they seemed 

 like shadows, and sometimes I imagined them to be 

 the ghosts of those pelagic birds which had recently 

 died in all the seas which flow round the world, 

 travelling by some way mysteriously known to them 

 to their ultimate bourne in the furthest north, beyond 

 the illimitable fields of ice where, according to Court- 

 hope, dead birds have their paradise. 



While this migration is visibly going on at sea 

 another is in progress all over the land which is not 

 seen or not noticed, and this is the departure of visi- 

 tants from the northern parts of Britain which have 

 been wintering in Cornwall. From day to day their 

 numbers diminish imperceptibly first fieldfares and 

 redwings ; then starlings, thrushes, larks, pipits, wag- 

 tails and some other species which come in smaller 

 numbers. By the end of February or quite early in 

 March the winter visitors, British and foreign, have 

 all slipped quietly away, their eastward movement 



