122 



Up in the Morning Early. 



There, look you, goes a great green dragon-fly, with 

 his myriad eyes — the first we have seen to-day — his 

 gauzy wings giving a kind of subdued sound, or are 

 our ears deceived between this and something else, 

 say, the first faint stirrings of the field cricket ? We 

 can hardly tell, for the humming in the air increases 

 round us as we sit in this benignant little natural 

 arbour of ours, midway in our morning walk, and we 

 find more and more difficulty in reliably differentiating 

 separate sounds. The distant and the near, too, get 

 more and more mixed up in the sense. Now come 

 soft and faint on the new stirring wind the low lowings 

 of kine from distant fields ; the cockcrows in challenge 

 pass over to and from the neighbouring farms ; and is 

 it possible that that is the distant hooting of an owl 

 even in daylight from some woody recess into which 

 the early sun-rays do not penetrate ? And, listen, can 

 that really be the woodpecker at his work already, tap, 

 tap, tapping the old elm tree ? There goes a little dipper, 

 very rare here, with bright flash on his wing; he is 



making his way to 

 the main stream up 

 yonder, the rivulets 

 or branches having 

 waned to mere 

 threads in the recent 

 drought; and we 

 have now and then 

 the sibilous cry of 

 the willow-wren or 

 chiff-chaff, and the 

 delicious dropping 

 music of the chaffinches from hedge and orchard. Ha ! 

 there goes a bullfinch, as if he had some pressing 



BULLFINCH. 



