lay back from the trunk of the tree—­lying on its back in the air, as it were, and fluttering its wings while holding on with its claws—­and seemed to invite the sparrow to come on.  I don’t think the sparrow had ever seen a woodpecker before.  Its curiosity rather than its wrath was aroused by the strange spectacle.  It did not want to hurt the foreigner, but only to look at him.  After having looked its fill, it moved off to a safer tree.  Then the woodpecker, whose heart had no doubt been in its boots for the past five minutes, also loosed its hold on the bark and made off over the gate for a less exciting garden.

Outside the garden the spring began on Good Friday.  It came in with the chiffchaff.  For three years in succession I have heard the first chiffchaff in exactly the same place—­a clump of nut-trees on the top of a high bank.  At this time of year, too, before the leaves are out, it is easy to see it.  And there are few more charming birds to watch.  With its little beak as slender as a grass-seed, and its body moving among the branches like a tiny shadow rather than flesh and bones, it pauses again and again in the midst of its eating to take an upward glance and utter its mite of music—­as monotonous as a Thibetan’s praying wheel.  Still lovelier is the willow-wren that follows it.  It is as though the chiffchaff were the first sketch of a willow-wren.  The willow-wren is the perfected work of art, with little shades of green added and a voice that, small though its range is, is perhaps the most exquisite that will fill the air till the nightingale arrives.  When I went out on Sunday morning, I prophesied that I would hear the first willow-wren, and, though I heard only one in a hill-side copse where the cowslips are just getting their bells ready, the prophecy came true.  Not that I am much of a prophet.  I don’t know how often I have prophesied the arrival of the swallow.  And, indeed, it is the surprises in nature, rather than the things that one foresees, that are the pleasantest—­especially if one is easily surprised, as I am.  Whoever ceases to be surprised, for instance, by the sight of a goldcrested wren?  I heard its tiny pinpoint of voice last Sunday afternoon when I was walking past a plantation where the bullace was in flower, and, on looking into the trees, saw the little thimble-sized creature making free with invisible insects—­his beak is hardly big enough to eat a visible one—­and performing acrobatics like a tit.  One of the charms of the goldcrest is that he does not look on a human being as a wild beast.  The blackbird regards a man as a policeman; the greenfinch bolts for it if you so much as look at him, but the goldcrest feels as secure in your presence as if you were behind bars in a cage in the Zoological Gardens.  One could probably make him jump if one went up to him and shouted suddenly into his ear, or even by making a violent gesture.  But his first instinct is not to run.  That, for a bird, is a considerable compliment.