mind, dormouse," shouted the squirrel, "you will know a bad egg
next time. Try this."

For five seconds there was a faint rasping sound, then a sharp crack, and
the rustle of two half-nutshells through the leaves. One of them struck
the side of the hazel-stump and bounded off like an elastic ball. Before
the dormouse had collected his wits, a fine kernel was thrust through the
nest and the squirrel had once more regained her bough.

"Eat it," she shrieked; "eat it before the sun goes down. It's going now."

And it was. Before a quarter of the kernel was accounted for, the western
sky had turned to lurid orange; before the half was gone, the chill struck
him. The nut dropped from his nerveless hands, his limbs tightened, his
ears sank into his skin, his eyelids drooped, and he was asleep once more.

* * * * *

The primroses had long yielded pride of place to the daffodils; these in
turn had paled before the marsh marigolds, but the most glorious yellow in
the picture was the Sulphur Butterfly. He zigzagged lightly down the
hedgerow, catching the sunshine at every turn, and the marigolds drooped
their heads at the sight of him. Close to the nest he dropped on a
briar-leaf, like a floating petal. He was more than colour now--he was
form. For a full minute he poised there motionless, the most exquisitely
graceful, the most exquisitely coloured of all our butterflies, and, for
a full minute, the dormouse watched him.

Next came a quivering, amber-tinted flight, resolved at rest into a
delicate medley of green and white and saffron. It was the orange-tip,
and the dormouse rejoiced, for the orange-tip meant spring. Such dainty
frailty could never stand the winter.

To tell of all he heard and saw that day would fill a book. At first, as
he peered through the crevices, he only grasped the more vivid tints--the
azure of the hyacinth, the roseblush of the almond, the crimson glow of
the clover, the purple of the foxglove. Then, as his senses quickened, the
whole glorious colour-scale, from ashbud to whitethorn, stood revealed.

From heaven above came the skylark's defiant challenge; from earth
beneath the fussy scream of the blackbird; on all sides the tweetings,
twitterings, chirrupings, chirrings and pipings of petulant finches, and,
in tender modulation to the avian chorus, the deep-throated, innumerable,
drowsy hum of insects. Colour and sound, love and war, it was spring
indeed.

[Illu