It was a rare pleasure to be in this company, to revel in their astonishing numbers, to feast my soul on them as it were—­little birds in such multitudes that ten thousand Frenchmen and Italians might have gorged to repletion on their small succulent bodies—­and to reflect that they were safe from persecution so long as they remained here in England.  This is something for an Englishman to be proud of.

After spending two hours at Crux Easton, with that dense immovable fog close by, I at length took the plunge to get to Highclere.  What a change!  I was at once where all form and colour and melody had been blotted out.  My clothes were hoary with clinging mist, my fingers numb with cold, and Highclere, its scattered cottages appearing like dim smudges through the whiteness, was the dreariest village on earth.  I fled on to Newbury in quest of warmth and light, and found it indoors, but the town was deep in the fog.

The next day I ventured out again to look for the sun, and found it not, but my ramble was not without its reward.  In a pine wood three miles from the town I stood awhile to listen to the sound as of copious rain of the moisture dropping from the trees, when a sudden tempest of loud, sharp metallic notes—­a sound dear to the ornithologist’s ears—­made me jump; and down into the very tree before which I was standing dropped a flock of about twenty crossbills.  So excited and noisy when coming down, the instant they touched the tree they became perfectly silent and motionless.  Seven of their number had settled on the outside shoots, and sat there within forty feet of me, looking like painted wooden images of small green and greenish-yellow parrots; for a space of fifteen minutes not the slightest movement did they make, and at length, before going, I waved my arms about and shouted to frighten them, and still they refused to stir.

Next morning that memorable fog lifted, to England’s joy, and quitting my refuge I went out once more into the region of high sheep-walks, adorned with beechen woods and traveller’s-joy in the hedges, rambling by Highclere, Burghclere, and Kingsclere.  The last—­Hampshire’s little Cuzco—­is a small and village-like old red brick town, unapproached by a railroad and unimproved, therefore still beautiful, as were all places in other, better, less civilized days.  Here in the late afternoon a chilly grey haze crept over the country and set me wishing for a fireside and the sound of friendly voices, and I turned my face towards beloved Silchester.  Leaving the hills behind me I got away from the haze and went my devious way by serpentine roads through a beautiful, wooded, undulating country.  And I wish that for a hundred, nay, for a thousand years to come, I could on each recurring November have such an afternoon ride, with that autumnal glory in the trees.  Sometimes, seeing the road before me carpeted with pure yellow, I said to myself, now I am coming to elms; but when the road shone red and russet-gold