WATCHING ROOKS 295 



silence, and, since the last flight out, there had been 

 silence in the plantation too — there was a tremen- 

 dous clamour of voices, filling the whole place, and 

 then a black, whirling snowstorm of rooks began to 

 shoot, whirr and whizz about, over, into, through, and 

 amongst the fir-trees, in a most extraordinary manner. 

 The rapidity with which they shot about, their hurt- 

 lings, their sideway-rushing sweeps and swoops, their 

 quick, smooth turns and gliding zig-zags, avoiding, 

 by miracle, each other and the trunks of trees, was 

 most extraordinary, whilst the whishing noise of their 

 wings through the air was almost frightening. The 

 plantation seemed to be a huge disturbed bee-hive, 

 with great black bees dashing angrily about it. It 

 was a snowstorm with the flakes gone mad ; but 

 black, a black, living bird-storm, and it produced in 

 me a feeling of excitement, a peculiar, almost a new, 

 sensation, analogous, perhaps, to what the birds them- 

 selves were feeling. What struck me and made it 

 more interesting, was that it was a special exhibition, 

 a ' set thing,' something indulged in by the birds 

 with a peculiar pleasure in the indulgence, something 

 appertaining to the home-coming — the '■ heimkehr' — 

 emanating from and requiring a particular, psychical 

 state. This is by far the finest display of the kind 

 I have yet seen, and I was in the very midst of it. 

 Considering the number of birds — there must, I think, 

 have been several hundreds — the speed at which they 

 dashed about and the smallness of the space in which 

 so many were moving with such violence, and so 

 erratically, it seems wonderful that they never came 

 into collision, either with one another or the trunks 

 or branches of the fir-trees. In the plantation, when 



