hung on the branches like notes of music.  The country children see them as lambs’ tails, dangling in twos and threes in the gentle air.  They have been growing longer every day since Christmas and the red tips of the female flowers have now begun to appear.  In the hedge there are still the remains of old man’s beard that, in one light, looks like dirty wool, but, with the sun shining on it, seems at a distance to be hawthorn in the full glory of blossom.  Every now and then a crooked caterpillar of down is detached from it by the wind and sails off vaguely over a field.  A few weeks ago sparrows were singing choruses as they gorged themselves upon it, but lately they have been scraping their beaks busily on the bark of trees as though they had found more satisfying dishes.  At the lower end of the road there is a glow of crimson among the sallows, which have begun to festoon their straight rods with silver buds.  Chaffinches are beginning to pipe more solitarily to each other in the tall elms.  A few weeks ago they fluttered everywhere in companies, occupying now a hedge, now a road, and now a tree.  The naturalists tell us that these winter companies of chaffinches are usually composed of birds of one sex only, the males consorting together for the time as in a boys’ school.  The chaffinch, I think, is the commonest bird in this part of the country.  It is so common that its loveliness has hardly been appreciated as it ought to be.  It is a little world of colour, like a small jay, and nothing could be more beautiful than its flushed breast as it sits on the top of a tall tree in the sunset.  As for the jay, it hurries away like a thief before one has time to see its coat of many colours.  The jay, like the cuckoo, is a bird with a guilty conscience.  The wood here is full of jays, uttering their one monotonous shriek, like the ripping of a skirt.  They scuttle among the trees at one’s approach, showing the white feather.  Occasionally, however, they too will sit in a tree and allow the sun to flush their cinnamon-coloured breasts.  But we shall see hundreds of them before we see a single one in the crested and passive splendour of the jays in the picture-books.  As a matter of fact, nearly all the birds in the picture-books are guesses and exaggerations.  The birds, we discover before long, are a secret kingdom into which it is given to few to enter.

The whole of Nature, indeed, is curiously secretive.  She does not tell much about herself save to the importunate.  Not many of us can speak her language or have learned the password to her cave of treasure.  She thrusts upon our notice a few birds, a few insects, a few animals, a few flowers.  But for the most part there is no finding her population without seeking for it.  Hundreds of her flowers are hidden from the lazy eye, and we may pass a lifetime without seeing so common a bird as a tree-creeper or so common an animal as a shrew-mouse.  How seldom it is one sees even a rat!  There are human beings who will never