And six hours after he had gone, the wind swung like a weather-cock, swung and stopped at northeast, and frost began to grip that garden in an iron fist that threatened to squeeze the life out of every living thing in it, and the sky hung like the lid of a lead box.

The thrush flew, with a few halts, practically all day and well into the night, and the northeast wind and the Frost King chased him south.

He roosted in a great fastness of age-old holly-bushes within a wood, whose branches were packed with his relations—­redwings, thrushes, and blackbirds, and also starlings—­all tired out, all booked for the south.

Some woods seem to hold a curse of gloom.  One cannot say why.  And this was one of them.  And the tawny owl that nobody saw but everybody heard, and the white stoat that everybody saw and nobody heard, and the amorous dog-fox with the cruel bark that everybody saw and heard, did not, taken together or singly, add to the gayety of the scene.

The thrush was just ahead of the cold when he went to roost in pouring rain.  In the night, however, the cold had overtaken him, and the thousand-jeweled beauty of frost-flakes flashed to his waking eye.

He was numbed and puffed out and peevish, and disinclined to move, but anything was better than sticking about in this roosting-place, this casual ward and clearing-house of the wild.  The keen starlings were already off, swinging away, regiment by regiment, with a fine, bold rush of wings; the blackbirds were dotting the glades; the redwings were slipping “weeping” away, to find soft fields to mope in; and the pigeon host—­what was left alive of it after diphtheria had taken its toll—­had streamed onwards, heading southwest.

Turdus philomelus spelt L-u-c-k for our friend that morn, for he had not prospected two hundred yards when he came on a place where a vagrant “sounder” of half-grown, domestic, unringed pigs had been canvassing the wood for beech-mast, acorns, and roots during the night.  The soil was all torn up for a space of about an acre, probably the only soil for miles—­except along streams and by springs—­penetrable by beaks until the sun came out; and the thrush feasted royally upon hibernating caterpillars and chrysalids that would have become moths, beetle larvae all curled up and asleep, and other pests; and he must have done a considerable amount of good in that place during the next hour or so.

But feasts do not go begging long in a frost-bound wild, even if they are hidden; and by the time our thrush had driven several other thrushes away—­for he was a jealous feeder—­and had been driven away by blackbirds himself more than once, starlings descended upon the place with their furious greed, and our thrush concluded that it was about time to “step off.”  The crowded place might become a quick-lunch resort for some others, not insect-feeders—­hawks, for instance—­and was unhealthful for that reason.  Indeed, he had not more than moved away into the shelter of the rhododendrons when a shadow with a hooked bill shot round the corner, going like the wind.  He had time to see it dive like a dipping kite—­but it was a sparrow-hawk—­and to hear the death-scream of a feeding blackbird, before he went completely from that place, and it knew him no more.