SPLASHES OF COLOUR. 
|* seemed to have nothing to do with any- 
thing at all; a place apart, a cavern of 
grays and browns, supported by vast, tower- 
ing, iron-hard columns; a haunt of silence and 
decay. Thus were the sombre, still aisles of 
the wood desolate in the chill of late winter. 
Then, upon the carpet of dead twigs, dead 
pine-needles, dead leaves, dead everything, 
faint splashes of colour showed. Because 
they moved they were visible. 
Nothing else moved, and that made them 
noticeable. There were flecks of white first— 
those were on dark wings ; there was wine-red 
—that was a breast; there was blue next, the 
cap on a small head; and, least noticeable of 
all, a beautiful moss-green back; and the 
whole was a chaffinch cock. 
He was getting over the ground with 
the little, unpretentious hop-walk gait of all 
chaffinches, sampling acorns. As it was the 
end of winter, he was hard run for food, and 
had dared to enter the sacred, secret silences 
of the wood as a last hope. The acorns had 
been scratched up and investigated by the 
little red bank-voles the night before. They 
knew how to gnaw in at the soft end, but not 
