26 HOW KESTRELS LIVE. 
The starlings, however, pelted into a flock 
of rooks engaged in ruining somebody’s next 
summer’s wheat-crop; and the rooks, sound- 
ing the ‘assembly,’ turned out in force and 
hunted the kestrel across the sky. 
Later, the little graceful hunter sat on a gate 
and tried to look happy and keep quite still, 
with his tail blowing over his back every fifteen 
seconds, and the rain dripping off his beak-tip. 
Wherefore the lark, which nobody ex- 
pected to be there, rising from his grass-tuft 
in the furrow to insist, aloft in song, on the 
ultimate joy of all things, became aware of a 
brown line drawn from the gate to above him 
before he knew what had happened. 
The lark deferred that song and shut his 
wings. He came down pretty quickly. So 
did the kestrel. But the grass-tuft swallowed 
the lark, with half an inch to spare, and the 
kestrel went back to his gate. 
The ditch that had been was a tearing stream 
now, and a voyaging water-vole, sailing up it, 
landed to investigate the commissariat possibili- 
ties of a mangel-wurzel ‘ cave’ near the gate. 
The kestrel saw his chubby head and stick- 
ing-out whiskers, and slid down as if he were 
hung to a wheel running on a tight wire. He 
said nothing as he did it, and I feel sure that 
the water-vole had no time to look. 
