IN A GARDEN. 
181 
face. The book itself may spoil the pleasure it 
was designed to give me, and instead of satisfying 
my hunger, increase it until the craving and 
sensation of emptiness becomes intolerable. Not 
any day spent in a library would I live again, but 
rather some lurid day of labour and anxiety, of 
strife, or peril, or passion. 
Occupied with this profound question, I scarcely 
noticed when my shade-sharer, with whom I 
sympathized only too keenly in her restless mood, 
rose and, lifting the light green curtain, passed out 
into the sunshine and was gone. Nor did I notice 
when the little wren ceased singing overhead. At 
length, recalled to myself, I began to wonder at the 
unusual silence in the garden, until, casting my eyes 
on the lawn, I discovered the reason; for there, 
moving about in their various ways, most of the 
birds were collected in a loose miscellaneous flock, 
a kind of happy family. There were the starlings, 
returned from the fields, and looking like little 
speckled rooks; some sparrows, and a couple of 
robins hopping about in their wild startled manner ; 
in strange contrast to these last appeared that 
little feathered clodhopper, the chafiinch, plodding 
over the turf as if he had hobnailed boots on his 
feet ; last, but not least, came statuesque black- 
birds and thrushes, moving, when they moved, like 
automata. They all appear to be finding some- 
