. And, by that token alone, he must have known that he was in
England. No other climate is capable of such crazy, unwarned,
health-trying changes. He had come in an icy, practically petrified
silence. He left in a steaming, swishing, streaming gale.

But that was not before he had been down to scratch like a fowl among
the dead leaves under the privet-hedge for grubs, who "kidded"
themselves that they were going to be fine, flashing insects next
summer. He also prospected a snail or two, and broke through their
fortifications by hammering the same upon a stone. And, by some magic
process that looked akin to the way in which some men divine water, he
divined a worm out of seemingly bare earth. It was there, too, and it
came up, not joyfully, but tugged, to be hammered and shaken into
something not too disgustingly alive to be swallowed.

Then, while a robin mounted to a spruce-spire and acted as Job's
comforter to all the birds of the garden by singing--ah, so plaintively
and sweetly!--of the dismal days of frost and snow, he "preened"--i.e.
went over and combed every feather, and tested and retested, cleaned
and recleaned, each vital quill. Then, in one single, watery, weak
stab of apology for sunshine, on the top of a fowl-shed, he surrendered
himself to what, in wild-bird land, is known as the "sunning reaction,"
which really consists of giving body and mind utterly to the sun and
complete rest.

And then he left.

Now, it was no chance that he left. Birds don't do business that way.
To you or me, that location and its climate would have seemed as good
for him to "peg out a claim" in as any other. He knew better.
Something--Heaven alone knows what--within him told him what was
coming. He had the power to take a draft on the future, and by that
means to save himself--if he could. Wherefore he flew on
southward--always south.

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--al