SPLASHES OF COLOUR. 29 
how to avoid being frightened by every sound 
and dropping the prize. Thus the chaffinch 
found many half-eaten acorns. 
Of course, he was all alone. Outside there 
in the world he could not have found the 
quarter of an acorn even without instantly 
being the centre of a crowd of fighting, 
starving finches. All alone he was, and 
nothing alive except the bank-voles and 
himself had ever come here, and 
A peculiar steady note sounded somewhere, 
and in a flash, before the smug little chaffinch 
knew what had happened, a splash of orange 
and black and brickish red and white fell from 
nowhere special, and fairly knocked him over. 
He was up again in less time than some girls 
can wink, and found himself looking into the 
biggest thing in heavy, thick, wedge-shaped 
beaks he had ever seen. 
Then he went quickly, lest this stumpy, 
sturdy apparition should eat him. But it did 
nothing of the kind. It ate acorns instead, 
cracking them in its wonderful bill as if they 
had been green peas instead of hard acorns. 
The bird was a hawfinch. 
Very vivid did he look in his orange-and- 
black livery, moving about on the floor of the 
drab wood. Besides acorns, he found a few 
strange, hard fruit-stones of the woods, things 
