212 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
a hive-bee came to them ; next the yellow crocus ; bees 
came to these, too, and so eager were they that one bee 
would visit the same flower five or six times before 
finally going away. Bees are very eager for water in 
the early year ; you may see them in crowds on the wet 
mud in ditches; there was a wild bee drowning in a 
basin of water the other day till I took him out. 
Before the end of January the woodbine leaf was 
out, always the first to come, and never learning that it 
is too soon; whether the woodbine came over with 
‘Richard Conqueror’ or the Romans, it still ima- 
gines itself ten degrees further south, so that some time 
scems necessary to teach a plant the alphabet. Imme- 
diately afterwards down came a north wind and put 
nature under its thumb for two months; the drone-fly 
hid himself, the bees went home, everything became 
shrivelled, dry, inhuman. The local direction of the 
wind might vary, but it was still the same polar draught, 
the blood-sucker ; for, like a vampire, it sucks the very 
blood and moisture out of delicate human life, just as it 
dries up the sap in the branch. While this lasted there 
were no notes to make, the changes were slower than 
the hour hand of a clock; still it was interesting to see 
the tree-climber come every morning at eleven o'clock 
tothe cobble-stone wall and ascend it exactly as he 
ascends trees, peering into chinks among the moss and 
the pennywort. He scemed almost as fond of these 
walls as of his tree trunks. He came regularly at eleven 
and again at three in the afternoon, and a barn owl 
went by with a screech every evening a little after eight. 
The starlings told the time of the year as accurately as 
the best chronometer at Whitehall. When I saw the 
last chimney swallow, November 30, they went by to 
their sleeping-trees about three o’clock in the afteruoon 
