TO EAT OR TO SLEEP 43 



6. 



There ate two reasons for being hungry. One is 

 absence of food, the other is expenditure of energy. 

 The second is apt to be much the more potent and pre 

 valent in a warm winter among all sorts of living things : 

 birds, mammals, and insects. The details of a particularly 

 early season are worth recording. The rooks began 

 to build on January the first, a ludicrously early date. 

 The village wakes in the morning to their extremely ener 

 getic noises ; and after sunset they career about the windy 

 sky with hilarious zest. Tennyson made them caw out 

 &quot; Maud, Maud, Maud.&quot; These birds are saying &quot; Spring, 

 spring, spring,&quot; with all the misplaced conviction of the 

 bellman s 



What I tell you three times is true. 



They had persuaded themselves of the truth and they 

 had already discovered their vernal energy and therefore 

 their vernal hunger. The sparrows had done exactly 

 the same ; and in one garden, at any rate, had expressed 

 their unseasonable hunger by falling on a frameful of 

 lettuces and devouring the best leaves, just as the pigeons 

 are skeletonising the turnips on adjacent tilths. 



Now, most of us delight in feeding our birds ; the 

 spirit of St. Francis is stronger in England than in Assisi 

 (though Mussolini is now reviving it in the new sanc 

 tuary of Capri). Yet this spirit of kindliness works too 

 partially : we feed some birds and no mammals ; and 

 perhaps are little aware of the habits of the classes that 

 we neglect. Immense numbers of people, as their letters 

 disclose, have observed that strings of pea-nuts may stir 

 the greed of the great tit, but carry small appeal to the 

 little blue-tit. Who can say of the tiny harvest mouse 



