THE REDWING 
the sound of running water, he followed it 
through thickets of briar, bamboo, berberis 
and yew, a garden of man's and nature's joint 
planting. Then just where the free wood began 
to predominate again, he came to the elders. 
The elder thicket is one of the few places in 
Coolnabrock which men have not yet hall- 
marked with bill-hook, and axe there is no 
path, and the brittle stems are interlaced so 
closely, breast high, that neither man nor horse 
can crash through them. It is the sanctuary of 
the Feather Folk. How many a woodcock has 
swung out of a fern tuft and heard the tardy 
shot zip away the twigs below his tail, as the 
sportsman brings up his gun through the kindly 
hampering branches ? How many a pigeon 
has clattered out on the thitherward side of the 
thicket, at the timely crack of a twig under the 
approaching keeper's foot ? And then in 
autumn, when the leaves begin to blanch, the 
bushes are hung with juicy mop-heads of 
berries the Feather Folk all know the elders 
thrush, pheasant, pigeon, and Seabac the Blue 
Hawk. Now the leaves had fallen, and the 
berries were all pulled ; but the stream, which 
ran too fast for any frost to bind, fell tinkling 
from one leaf-dammed basin to another, and on 
the farther bank grew holly, best of all covert 
for thrushes. Shacaim, from a beech-tree, saw 
'43 
