WILD LIFE ON THE WING 
to drub her now that she was crippled. She 
was rescued before extremest lengths were 
reached, and then ran shrieking to the wood. 
She knew that she was changed, but the wood 
would be the same. But it was not. Her 
cackling drove peace from the place : the 
pigeons clattered out of the trees : the field- 
mice hushed their squabbles as she passed ; 
and though she wandered up and down until 
Charles' Wain hung over the mountains to the 
north, she did not find what she sought. It was 
still sweet evening, and under the spell of dew- 
fall even the Tonsella farmyard ordinarily full 
of the reek of ill-kept beasts and men, of shag 
tobacco and of cooking food smelt clean. The 
Yellow Pullet's roosting perch in the big ash- 
tree was three stages up one flight to the gate- 
post, a higher to the barn gable, the third, a 
mere hop to the branch. Seven times she 
fluttered at the gate-post, seven times she 
breasted the second bar of the gate and fell 
back gasping. Her clamour brought the dog, 
the cat, the other fowls, to stare and comment 
derisively. Last of all she was carried off head 
downwards, still shrieking, and shut into a coop. 
For the first time since she roosted outside her 
mother's feathers, the Yellow Pullet slept on the 
flat ground in the darkness, instead of aloft in 
the starshine with the wind under her breast. 
