Up to the moment when the dog got his smart blow and fled from her she had been under the domination of a powerful instinct, and could have acted in no other way; but what guided her so infallibly in her subsequent actions? Certainly not instinct, and not reason, which hesitates between
120 BIRDS IN TOWN AND VILLAGE
different courses and is slow to arrive at a decision. One can only say that it was, or was like, intuition, which is as much as to say that we don't know.
IX
AMONG the rarer fringilline birds on the common were the cirl bunting, bullfinch and goldfinch, the last two rarely seen. Linnets, however, were abundant, now gathered in small flocks composed mainly of young birds in plain plumage, with here and there an individual showing the carmine-tinted breast of the adult male. Unhappily, a dreary fate was in store for many of these blithe twitterers.
On June 24, when walking towards the pool, I spied two recumbent human figures on a stretch of level turf near its banks, and near them a something dark on the grass--a pair of clap-nets! "Still another serpent in my birds' paradise!" said I to myself, and, walking on, I skirted the nets and sat down on the grass beside the men. One was a rough brown-faced country lad; the other, who held the strings and wore the usual cap and comforter, was a man of about five-and-twenty,