umbers; their constant
'croo-croo' is audible at some distance.

The meadows, so long bound by frost and covered with snow, are slowly
losing their wan aspect, and assuming a warmer green as the young blades
of grass come upwards. Where the plough or harrow has passed over the
clods they quickly change from the rich brown of fresh-turned soil to a
whiter colour, the dryness of the atmosphere immediately dissipating the
moisture in the earth. So, examine what you will, from the clod to the
tiniest branch, the hedge, the mound, the water--everywhere a step forward
has been taken. The difference in a particular case may be minute; but it
is there, and together these faint indications show how closely spring is
approaching.

As the sun rises the chaffinch utters his bold challenge on the tree; the
notes are so rapid that they seem to come all at once. Welcome, indeed, is
the song of the first finch. Sparrows are busy in the garden--the hens are
by far the most numerous now, half a dozen together perch on the bushes.
One suddenly darts forth and seizes a black insect as it flies in the
sunshine. The bee, too, is abroad, and once now and then a yellow
butterfly. From the copse on the warmer days comes occasionally the deep
hollow bass of the wood pigeon. On the very topmost branch of an elm a
magpie has perched; now he looks this way, and then turns that, bowing in
the oddest manner, and jerking his long tail up and down. Then two of them
flutter across the field--feebly, as if they had barely strength to reach
the trees in the opposite hedge. Extending their wings they float slowly,
and every now and then the body undulates along its entire length. Rooks
are building--they fly and feed now in pairs; the rookery is alive with
them. To the steeple the jackdaws have returned and fly round and round;
now one holds his wings rigid and slides down at an angle of sixty degrees
at a breakneck pace, as if about to dash himself in fragments on the
garden beneath.

Sometimes there come a few days which are like summer. There is an almost
cloudless sky, a gentle warm breeze, and a bright sun filling the fields
with a glow of light. The air, though soft and genial, is dry, and perhaps
it is this quality which gives so peculiar a definition to hedge, tree,
and hill. A firm, almost hard, outline brings copse and wood into clear
relief; the distance across the broadest fields appears sensibly
diminished. Such freedom from moisture has a d