WINTERHEAD: AN UPLAND PASTURE. [ ImagesList]
A bird-haunted spot is this little hollow in the hills. The clump of old Scotch firs looking down from the hill-slope yonder is the harbour of crow and magpie, ever the hangers-on of a West Country farm. The straggling hedge-rows that part these broad fields are full of empty nests. Here, among the red fruit of rowan and whitebeam, the ring-ousel lingers on his southward journey. In this old apple tree, whose withered arms are hung for once with fruit, like little golden balls, is a woodpecker's hole, with marks of the maker's tool about it yet. That stately oak tree, springing straight and tall in the line of the old hedge-row—touched above with a hundred points of light where the pale green acorns hang, and laced below, across its drooping branches, with silver lines of gossamer—is a resting place for all the birds of the air. In the spring the cuckoo alights upon its topmost crown and calls his name to all the neighbourhood. From its leafy crest the magpie looks down, meditating another raid upon the hencoop. The brown squirrels too, love to frolic in its dim green shadows, playing hide and seek among the branches, and racing headlong down its wrinkled bark to scamper over the short turf of the meadow. At this moment two linnets on its topmost spray are filling the air with such a chorus of sweet notes and breezy chattering that you might think a score of birds were in the tree.
The sun is sinking low. The shadows of the hedge-row elms are stealing far down the grassy slope. Sparrows that have been gleaning in outlying stubble-fields are flying home to roost in the ivy on the old barn wall, or in the sides of the stacks, or in snug tunnels that they have made for themselves in the thatched roof of their thankless lord and suzerain:—quarters infinitely cleaner and sweeter and more wholesome altogether than those of their smoke-blackened cousins in the city. The sun is down. A soft blue mist is gathering in the red heart of the pines. And now
"The shadows veil the meadows,
And the sunset's golden ladders
Sink from twilight's walls of grey."
