that they think you anywhere rather than where you are! It is like eavesdropping, it hardly seems right. Now the nearest greenfinch picks out an ear of the corn and, as if to show you just how he does it, comes even a thought nearer. He turns it till it is crosswise in his beak, snips off the stalk, rapidly divests it of what remains of the outer huskiness—in doing which you see him work his mandibles in a delicate, tactile manner—and swallows the inner essence. Throughout he does not help himself with his claws at all. It is pleasant to see this, but still more so to have so many little dicky birds just within a pace or two, all free and unconstrained and knowing nothing whatever about it. It is as if you had somehow got into a bird-cage without alarming the inmates, but even as this occurs to you you recognise the poverty of the simile, and rejoice to be in nature's aviary—at least one may say this of the birds if not of the straw-stack.
There is now, besides chaffinches and greenfinches, which form the great bulk of the numbers, quite a little crowd of bramblings—twenty or more—their beautiful gold-russet plumage gleaming out in an easy pre-eminence of colour; for they are, indeed, much handsomer than the handsomest cock chaffinch or greenfinch, and as both the sexes are alike, nothing of them is lost, there are no dead-weights. Even the yellow-hammers when at their yellowest cannot compete with these chestnut beauties, and the pretty little blue-tits who feed softly—two or three together—on the poppy seeds are beaten, whether they confess it or not. A hedge-sparrow or two hopping very quietly and unobtrusively about on the outskirts of the great
