r bitter experience, and a warning,
seared into the bird's memory.

So far, so good. He had made his escape, had euchred Fate, but--the
payment for laziness, the terrible cess for a momentary lapse from
vigilance, which great Nature, in her grim, wise cruelty, always
demands, had to be met, and the end of it was not yet.

It began, however, now.

The thrush discovered that he was not alone in the air, and that he had
all at once got himself, as it were, fixed in the public eye, and was
"wanted." A swish in the sky made him look up, to see a rook, with a
leering eye, coming down upon him. He cleverly "side-slipped" in
mid-air, and let the rook, braking wildly, go diving by. Perhaps he
wondered what had turned the rook hawk. As a matter of fact, the
weather had, partly, and the rifle had, the rest; for the rook could
see what the thrush did not yet realize.

The rook went away astern, shouting bad language, and another foe came
to take his, or her, place. Again our thrush discovered that he was
not alone. Little, white, silent, cruel, dancing flakes of white were
traveling more or less with him and downwards, upon the following wind.
The snow! The snow at last! And he was trapped, for it was to keep
ahead of the snow that he had journeyed all that way back again.
Indeed, you can hardly realize, unless you have almost lived their
life, what the snow and the frost mean to all the thrush people, but
more especially to the common song-thrush and the redwing. At the
worst it means death; at the best, little more than a living death.

However, to race the snow were useless. Yet he flew on, and on, and
on, like a stampeded horse, blindly, one-sidedly, while the ordnance
survey map beneath turned from brown, and chocolate, and silver-gray,
and dull green, first to pepper and salt, then to freckled white, then
all over to the spotless white eider-down quilt of the winter returned,
as far as the eye--even his binocular orbs--could reach, muffling tree
and house, and garden and copse, and farm and field, and fallow and
plow and meadow in the one mystical, silent, white disguise of winter.
And the thrush at length came down.

His eye had spotted a little corner of a garden that might have been a
spread table in the wilderness. It was only a small triangle of lawn,
with a summer-house at its apex, and a spruce-fir and a house at its
base, and privet-hedges marking off the rest. But it had a
"bird-table," and a swep