72 
BIBDS IN A VILLAGE. 
had for me was gone. It was not quite the same 
as formerly ; even the sunshine had a something of 
conscious sadness in it which was like a shadow. 
Those merry little brown twitterers that frequently 
shot across the sky, looking small as insects in the 
wide blue expanse, and ever and anon dropped 
swiftly down like showers of aerolites, to lose 
themselves in the grass and herbage, or perch 
singing on the topmost dead twigs of a bush, now 
existed in constant imminent danger — not of that 
quick merciful destruction which nature has for 
her weaklings, and for all that fail to reach her 
high standard ; but of a worse fate, the prison life 
which is not nature's ordinance, but one of large- 
brained man's abhorred inventions. Instead of 
taking my usual long strolls about the common I 
loitered once more in the village lanes and had my 
reward. 
On the morning of June 27 I was out sauntering 
very indolently, thinking of nothing at all; for it 
was a surpassingly brilliant day, and the sunshine 
produced the effect of a warm, lucent, buoying 
fluid, in which I seemed to float rather than walk — 
a celestial water, which, like the more ponderable 
and common kind of water, may sometimes be both 
felt and seen. The sensation of feeling it is some- 
what similar to that experienced by a bather 
standing breast-deep in a clear green, warm tropical 
