WINTER BIRDS. 225 



orange bill, bops from beneath the laurels. 

 His strong flight is laboured, his eye askance 

 detects no food. Although an omnivorous 

 feeder, competition is keen, and the Sparrows 

 and Finches leave him but little. He pecks the 

 hard ground ; and the great red sun goes down 

 without his parting " clink, clink ! " Like the 

 rest of the Thrushes, he is slowly starving. 



One of the most beautiful and sprightly of 

 British birds is the Goldfinch. . . . 



A neglected field that has run to seed, covered 

 over with nodding thistles and " horse-knops ; " 

 in its corners are bunches of groundsel and dan- 

 delion and plantain. It is rarely visited, and 

 never stocked. Now and then a lad comes with 

 a sickle and lays low the glowing pride of fox- 

 glove and thistle ; but somehow he never works 

 systematically, and hence never changes the 

 aspect of that particular field. The charac- 

 teristic flora of the spot still holds its own, 

 and the weed-harvest of each year is greater 

 than that of the last. Bunches of nettles and 

 docks and campions hide the nesting-place of 

 the ground birds, and under that rotten stump 

 resides a colony of Hedgehogs. A pair of Larks 

 have their nest under an overhanging tuft, and 



Q 



