A brook runs through sandhills on the other side of the headland, and at one place the red cattle stand in cool water to their dewlaps, gazing tranquilly about them. Here is the great meeting-place of the birds, and at any time of the day, from dawn to sunset, its pebbly shallow is thronged with finches, pippits, doves, warblers, and cuckoos. How the goldfinches love the water! With sweet, reedy twitterings a flock will come from orchard haunts and bathe in the running water, the yellow-barred wings aflutter and crimson faces dipped again and again. Copper finches follow, with perhaps those minute travellers the Golden-Crowned Knights, as the country folk so beautifully term the smallest British bird.
Other creatures know of this avian meeting-place. The weasel comes, and a great sombre pair of ravens; and the sparrowhawk dashes sometimes in the midst, seizing one of the bathers. To me this is a place of pilgrimage, where all things come down to the life-giving waters. Even here, however, there is heard in the heated air those sad cries from the hills.
A village girl showed me some verses she had written on the drought. She was singing by the waterside, a little maid in a print dress. With shy eyes she tendered the poem. I remember the last verse:—
God of Pity, I beseech Thee,
Send us rain in healing shower,
For the fields I see around me
Death and Ruin hold in power.
But from the west comes no cloud; only the fiery sun burns in a pitiless sky.
COCKNEY BIRD TRIPPERS
My work necessitated long hours in London, and I used to bless the sparrows; I was never tired of watching them. They lifted my mind from dusty pavements and the smell of motor traffic. A favourite place to see them was a garden adjoining a church in Gracechurch Street; another was by the fountains of Trafalgar Square. About the time of harvest in the country, for which I pined, I used to notice an absence of the winged urchins. Where before a noisy, squabbling party congregated in the park or near the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, in August a solitary couple or two hopped quietly. These, I imagined, had not answered the call that came to their dingy brethren, the same call that came to the weary Londoner at that period of the year.