A CITY OF BIRDS 67 



killed by the swans. I often used to see him speeding 

 straight as an arrow along the middle of the moat, the 

 azure of the back brighter than the fourteenth-century 

 glass I had been looking at in the north transept of 

 the cathedral. Sometimes this Hylas of the moat would 

 perch on a bush over the water with the sun riding 

 on his back, where he would remain quite motionless, 

 a jewelled figure of oriental tapestry, but in the spirit 

 of life dulling the fine colours of the paint-box. 



Autumn, indeed, is almost as good a time as spring 

 to potter about this favoured town, escaping for a 

 moment these sombre months and years in the 

 history of man. The saints stand at peace in their 

 arcades along the west front of this most human of 

 cathedrals, and the birds, what with abundance of 

 food, the sorrows of winter and migration ahead, and 

 the toilsome responsibilities of parenthood behind, go 

 about their business in a light-hearted, pleasuring spirit, 

 in which the necessities of life play a smiling part. 

 Their losses are forgotten, nor yet is there any fading 

 in the attentions of lovers to one another, even though 

 the social, the packing instinct begins to drive a wedge 

 into family life. 



Wagtails were collecting on the green before the 

 west front, as they were in the cloister-garth, the 

 tombstones of which were perches for the fly-catchers. 

 These wagtails had acclimatized themselves to the 

 atmosphere of the building almost as perfectly as the 

 " ecclesiastical daws." They darted among the gables, 

 turrets, buttresses and parapets of the cathedral, hovering 

 perhaps before some fine tracery of foliage like humming 

 birds above a forest orchid. Then away they would 

 go over a wall or under a cornice with that whirligig, 

 convulsive movement of body and tail, which throws 

 out flashes of black, grey and white. Swallows and 

 martins were assembling in hundreds, keeping more 

 or less separate, the moth-like martins preferring the 

 neighbourhood of the water, the swallows sweeping the 

 lawns and greens an inch from the ground, occasionally 

 disturbing the wagtails (who would take a little skip 

 out of the way) and looking from above Hke enormous 



