silence, and, since the last flight out, there had been silence in the plantation too—there was a tremendous clamour of voices, filling the whole place, and then a black, whirling snowstorm of rooks began to shoot, whirr and whizz about, over, into, through, and amongst the fir-trees, in a most extraordinary manner. The rapidity with which they shot about, their hurtlings, their sideway-rushing sweeps and swoops, their quick, smooth turns and gliding zig-zags, avoiding, by miracle, each other and the trunks of trees, was most extraordinary, whilst the whishing noise of their wings through the air was almost frightening. The plantation seemed to be a huge disturbed bee-hive, with great black bees dashing angrily about it. It was a snowstorm with the flakes gone mad; but black, a black, living bird-storm, and it produced in me a feeling of excitement, a peculiar, almost a new, sensation, analogous, perhaps, to what the birds themselves were feeling. What struck me and made it more interesting, was that it was a special exhibition, a 'set thing,' something indulged in by the birds with a peculiar pleasure in the indulgence, something appertaining to the home-coming—the 'heimkehr'—emanating from and requiring a particular, psychical state. This is by far the finest display of the kind I have yet seen, and I was in the very midst of it. Considering the number of birds—there must, I think, have been several hundreds—the speed at which they dashed about and the smallness of the space in which so many were moving with such violence, and so erratically, it seems wonderful that they never came into collision, either with one another or the trunks or branches of the fir-trees. In the plantation, when
