commence. First a few greenfinches—principally hens—fly down upon the heap, then chaffinches, both cocks and hens, but hens predominating, with a few yellow-hammers, mostly of immature plumage, and a hedge-sparrow or two. These birds come and go independently for some little time, and it is not till the morning has grown lighter that they begin to form a band, in the sense not of their numbers only, but also of their actions. It is only gradually, for instance, that their habit of all flying away together into the neighbouring trees and returning quickly again in the same way becomes at all marked. They are at first independent units, but as the day brightens and the numbers increase they become more and more interdependent. Now, too, there is more equality in the numbers of the sexes. The females still predominate, but one would not always think that this was the case, for as they all whirr into a large oak tree that is beginning now to be gilded by the beams of the tardily-rising sun, its bare boughs and twigs, as well as the surrounding bushes, are made suddenly lovely with bright, soft green and mauvy-purplish red. A glorious winter foliage this, that might make an old tree feel young again!
All the time the birds are down on the heap they are busily feeding, seeming to put their whole soul into each peck (like the single jest at the Mermaid) and all in a kind of sociable, yet but half friendly, competition with each other. Gradually they spread out a little from the heap, half-a-dozen greenfinches are amongst the straw that one has oneself pulled out from the stack, and one of them is feeding positively within three feet. To see them so near, and to think
