A VILLAGE IN HAMPSHIRE 195 



By far the commonest birds on the common were 

 cole-tits, which I met everywhere. They are quite 

 fearless of man, and in a little pine-grove where I sat 

 down they spun round the twigs and gambolled and 

 bustled and chattered and postured and stood on their 

 lieads about me, like as if I were no more than a giant 

 fallen cone. I prefer their shriller, crisper, more vibrat- 

 ing notes to those of all the tits, with the exception of 

 tomtit's spring bell. But I had a rarer experience 

 than this, for a pair of jays (without young, like the 

 water-birds) dropped in on the pines. There it all was 

 in the flesh, as Hudson describes in Birds in a Village, 

 <;rest raised and depressed, bright eyes narrowly re- 

 garding me, head bobbed, wings outflung, feet perching 

 now on one branch now on another, and cinnamon body, 

 embroidered with black, white and blue, radiant against 

 the dark trees. Never before had I seen jays so tame 

 and so at my ease, and this pair, at any rate, cannot 

 have known persecution. 



How readily the quick-minded bird sloughs a habit ! 

 My old friend Squire's vivid picture of its unchange- 

 ableness in his poem, " The Birds," is a bookish one. 

 "We do not ask our poets to be expert ornithologists, 

 hut if their poetry will not square with the truth of 

 the universe, whether as observed or divined, it is no 

 more than picturesque. For if birds were the fixed 

 •quantity (" They are unchanging : man must still ex- 

 plore ") he represents them, they would, of course, 

 liave been extinct centuries ago. The truth is that 

 the entire conglomerate of organic — yes, and inorganic 

 Jife — is on an exploring expedition, prospecting for God, 

 crystals no less than man, and immobility (as Blake 

 knew very well) is the sin against nature, if it be not 

 another name for hell itself. 



It was a melancholy business on the north side of 

 the railway, once pine-wood and heath merging into 

 a large, wooded, private estate. The utilitarian hackers 

 and hewers (a utilitarian is a creature who destroys 

 beautiful and useful things for ugly and frivolous pur- 

 poses) had been there, and the ground was like a battle- 

 ifield strewn thick with the bodies of pine, fir and other 



