There are some days, no doubt, on which the chill damp in the air seems to terrify almost every living thing into hiding, and the stillness of the dead world is not disturbed by any bird or insect.  Even the jackdaws have mysteriously disappeared like melted snow.  But no sooner does the storm in the sky break up into floating islands of cloud and the sun shine than all the world begins to glitter again, bramble and ivy and stone, and a host of tiny and coloured creatures resume their game of an infinite general post in the bright air.  The ivy especially is a little continent of life where-ever it grows.  Clambering over a wall or climbing up among the sloes in a blackthorn it attracts bee and wasp and fly, blue fly and grey fly and green fly, to graze on the pollen of its late flowers.  The ivy is the last of the plants to flower, and insects come to it as from the ends of the earth in rejoicing myriads.  Among the berries in the hedges the birds, too, rejoice.  The robin, though for the most part, I believe, a meat-eater, becomes unambiguously happy at this time of year.  He has usurped the morning, and, while one is lying in bed, he is boasting in the trees outside where the thrush and the blackbird will in a few months be boasting with their scarcely more beautiful voices.  I am half persuaded that his song becomes different at this season.  As he sits and sways on the top of a cypress and looks down on a rich and eatable world, he seems to have cast every note of pensive sadness out of his being and to sing aloud the rapture of a happy stomach.  He is no longer the singer of elegy but of ecstasy.  He is as unlike his old simple, friendly, appealing, pathetic self as a beggar who has come into a fortune.  He actually swaggers, and, as he does so, he can fill a garden or a wood at the end of October with the pleasure of spring.

The large titmouse in its dark cap, and the blue-tit, almost too pretty for an English winter in its blue and yellow coat, also hasten to the feast of the berries.  I do not know whether, under the iron reign of high prices, people have ceased to hang out coco-nuts in their gardens for the blue-tits; at present, fortunately, the berries are abundant, and it is pleasant to see a tit venture to the edge of the road in quest of one and then fly off into hiding, like a thief, with a red ball in his beak.  A scarcely less pretty bird that one sees flying across the road now and then with cries of alarm is the grey wagtail.  The grey wagtail, you probably know, is the wagtail that is not grey.  As it struggles and shrills through the sunny air, it seems a delight mainly of yellow.  Both its cries and its flight make one think that it lives in constant terror of falling.  It proceeds through the air in a series of efforts and ups-and-downs, and its long tail seems perpetually to threaten to misguide it into collapse.  Down among the rocks and in the fields near them, the real grey wagtails abound—­the pied wagtails,