l 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 rou