body, so that he appeared encircled with a white ring.

The swifts have not come, up to the 10th, but there are young
thrushes about able to fly. There was one at the top of the garden
the other day almost as large as his parent. Nesting is in the
fullest progress. I chanced on a hedge-sparrow's lately, the whole
groundwork of which was composed of the dry vines of the wild white
convolvulus. All the birds are come, I think, except the swift, the
chat, and the redstart: very likely the last two are in the
neighbourhood, though I have not seen them. In the furze on Tolworth
Common--a resort of chats--the land-lizards are busy every sunny
day. They run over the bunches of dead, dry grass--quite white and
blanched--grasping it in their claws, like a monkey with hands and
prehensile feet. They are much swifter than would be supposed. There
was one on the sward by the Ewell road the other morning, quite
without a tail; the creature was as quick as possible, but the grass
too short to hide under till it reached some nettles.

The roan and white cattle happily grazing in the meadows by the
Hogsmill brook look as if they had never been absent, as if they
belonged to the place, like the trees, and had never been shut up in
the yards through so terrible a winter. The water of the Hogsmill
has a way of escaping like that of larger channels, and has made for
itself a course for its overflow across a corner of the meadow by
the road. A thin place in the rather raised bank lets it through in
flood-time (like a bursting loose of the Mississippi), and down it
rushes towards the moat. Beside the furrows thus soaked now and
then, there are bunches of marsh-marigold in flower, and though the
field is bright with dandelions and buttercups, the marigolds are
numerous enough to be visible on the other side of it, 300 yards or
more distant, and are easily distinguished by their different
yellow. White cuckoo-flowers (_Cardamine_) are so thick in many
fields that the green tint of the grass is lost under their silvery
hue. Bluebells are in full bloom. There are some on the mound
between Claygate and the Ewell road; the footpath to Chessington
from Roxby Farm passes a copse on the left which shimmers in the
azure; on the mound on the right of the lane to Horton they are
plentiful this year--the hedge has been cut, and consequently more
have shot up. Cowslips innumerable. The pond by the Ewell road,
between this and Red Lion Lane, is dotted wi