As the twilight brightens the scuffling will increase, until before the sun rises there will be a battle-royal, and then the combatants will set to preening their ruffled feathers, disordered by the tumults and alarms of the wakeful night.

The bats begin to seek their holes and corners about an hour before the dawn, if the night has been clear and favourable.  The moths are gone home even before this, so that there is little chance of seeing by daylight the wonderfully beautiful undervests of peacock blue and straw colour which they wear beneath their plain hodden-grey overcoats.

The Coming of the Dawn.

It is now close on the dawning, and the cocks have been saying so from many farm-houses for half an hour—­tiny, fairy cock-crows, clear and shrill from far away, like pixies blowing their horns of departure, “All aboard for Elfland!” lest the hateful revealing sun should light upon their revels.  Nearer, hoarse and raucous Chanticleer (of Shanghai evidently, from the chronic cold which sends his voice deep down into his spurs)—­thunders an earth-shaking bass.  ’Tis time for night hawks to be in bed, for the keepers will be astir in a little, and it looks suspicious to be seen leaving the pheasant coverts at four in the morning.  The hands of the watch point to the hour, and as though waiting for the word, the whole rookery rises in a black mass and drifts westward across the tree-tops.

Flood Tide of Night.

In these long midsummer nights the twilight lingers till within an hour or two of dawn.  When the green cool abyss of fathomless sky melts into pale slate-grey in the west, and the high tide of darkness pauses before it begins to ebb, then is the watershed of day and night.  The real noon of night is quite an hour and a half after the witching hour, just as the depth of winter is really a month after the shortest day.  Indeed, at this time of the year, it is much too bright at twelve for even so sleepy a place as a churchyard to yawn.  And if any ghost peeped out, ’twould only be to duck under again, all a-tremble lest, the underground horologes being out of gear, a poor shade had somehow overslept cockcrow and missed his accustomed airing.

Way for the Sun.

By two o’clock, however, there is a distinct brightening in the east, and pale, streaky cirrus cloudlets gather to bar the sun’s way.  Broad, equal-blowing airs begin to draw to and fro through the woods.  There is an earthy scent of wet leaves, sharpened with an unmistakable aromatic whiff of garlic, which has been trodden upon and rises to reproach us for our carelessness.  Listen!  Let us stand beneath this low-branched elder.

  “We cannot see what flowers are at our feet,”