but that there is violet in abundance we have the testimony of a sense which the darkness does not affect, the same which informed us of the presence of the garlic.  Over the hedge the sheep are cropping the clover with short, sharp bites—­one, two, three, four, five bites—­then three or four shiftings of the short black legs, and again “crop, crop.”  So the woolly backs are bent all the night, the soft ears not erected as by day, but laid back against the shoulders.  Sheep sleep little.  They lie down suddenly, as though they were settled for the night; but in a little there is an unsteady pitch fore and aft, and the animal is again at the work of munching, steadily and apparently mechanically.  I have often half believed that sheep can eat and walk and sleep all at the same time.  A bivouac of sheep without lambs in the summer is very like an Arab encampment, and calls up nights in the desert, when, at whatever hour the traveller might look abroad, there were always some of the Arabs awake, stirring the embers of the camp fire, smoking, story-telling, or simply moving restlessly about among the animals.  As we stand under the elder-bushes we can look down among the sheep, for they have not the wild animal’s sense of smell, or else the presence of man disturbs them not.  One of the flock gives an almost human cough, as if protesting against the dampness of the night.

The Early Bird.

Swish!  Something soft, silent, and white comes across the hedge almost in our eyes, and settles in that oak without a sound.  It is a barn-owl.  After him a wood-pigeon, the whistling swoop of whose wings you can hear half a mile.  The owl is just going to bed.  The pigeon is only just astir.  He is going to have the first turn at Farmer Macmillan’s green corn, which is now getting nicely sweet and milky.  The owl has still an open-mouthed family in the cleft of the oak, and it is only by a strict attention to business that he can support his offspring.  He has been carrying field mice and dor-beetles to them all night; and he has just paused for a moment to take a snack for himself, the first he has had since the gloaming.

But the dawn is coming now very swiftly.  The first blackbird is pulling at the early worm on the green slope of the woodside, for all the world like a sailor at a rope.  The early worm wishes he had never been advised to rise so soon in order to get the dew on the grass.  He resolves that if any reasonable proportion of him gets off this time, he will speak his mind to the patriarch of his tribe who is always so full of advice how to get “healthy, wealthy, and wise.”  ’Tis a good tug-of-war.  The worm has his tail tangled up with the centre of the earth.  The blackbird has not a very good hold.  He slackens a moment to get a better, but it is too late.  He ought to have made the best of what purchase he had.  Like a coiled spring returning to its set, the worm, released, vanishes into its hole; and the yellow bill flies up into the branches of a thorn with an angry chuckle, which says as plainly as a boy who has chased an enemy to the fortress of home, “Wait till I catch you out again!”