when they did, chose a spot much nearer the house than usual.
The turtle-dove has a way of gurgling the soft vowels "oo" in the
throat. Swallows do not make a summer, but when the turtle-dove coos
summer is certainly come. One afternoon one of the pair flew up into a
hornbeam which stood beside the garden not twenty yards at farthest. At
first he sat upright on the branch watching me below, then turned and
fluttered down to the nest beneath.

While this nesting was going on I could hear five different birds at
once either in the garden or from any of the windows. The doves cooed,
and every now and then their gentle tones were overpowered by the loud
call of the wood-pigeons. A cuckoo called from the top of the tallest
birch, and a nightingale and a brook-sparrow (or sedge-reedling) were
audible together in the common on the opposite side of the road. It is
remarkable that one season there seems more of one kind of bird than the
next. The year alluded to, for instance, in this copse was the
wood-pigeons' year. But one season previously the copse seemed to belong
to the missel-thrushes.

Early in the March mornings I used to wake as the workmen's trains went
rumbling by to the great City, to see on the ceiling by the window a
streak of sunlight, tinted orange by the vapour through which the level
beams had passed. Something in the sense of morning lifts the heart up
to the sun. The light, the air, the waving branches speak; the earth
and life seem boundless at that moment. In this it is the same on the
verge of the artificial City as when the rays come streaming through the
pure atmosphere of the Downs. While thus thinking, suddenly there rang
out three clear, trumpet-like notes from a tree at the edge of the copse
by the garden. A softer song followed, and then again the same three
notes, whose wild sweetness echoed through the wood.

The voice of the missel-thrush sounded not only close at hand and in the
room, but repeated itself as it floated away, as the bugle-call does. He
is the trumpeter of spring: Lord of March, his proud call challenges the
woods; there are none who can answer. Listen for the missel-thrush: when
he sings the snow may fall, the rain drift, but not for long; the
violets are near at hand. The nest was in a birch visible from the
garden, and that season seemed to be the missel-thrush's. Another year
the cuckoos had possession.

There is a detached ash tree in the field by the copse; it stands apa