An Old Rook - I Fancy He Is Old, A Many-Wintered Crow - Is Loudly Caw-Cawing From The Elm Tree

Top; he has been abroad all day in the fields and has seen his young able to feed themselves; and

His own crop full, and now he is calling to the others to come and sit there to enjoy the sunshine with him. I doubt if he is happier than the human inhabitants of the village, the field labourers and shepherds who have been out toiling since the early hours, and are now busy in their own gardens and allotments or placidly smoking their pipes at their cottage doors.

But I could not stay longer in that village of old unhappy memories and of quiet, happy, uninteresting lives that leave no memory, so after waiting two more days I forced myself to say good-bye to my poor old landlady. Or rather to say "Good night," as I had to start at one o'clock in the morning so as to have a couple, of hours before sunrise at "The Stones" on my way to Salisbury. Her latest effort to detain me a day longer had been made and there was no more to say.

"Do you know," she said in a low mysterious voice, "that it is not safe to be alone at midnight on this long lonely road - the loneliest place in all Salisbury Plain?" "The safest," I said. "Safe as the Tower of London - the protectors of all England are there." "Ah, there's where the danger is!" she returned. "If you meet some desperate man, a deserter with his rifle in his hand perhaps, do you think he would hesitate about knocking you over to save himself and at the same time get a little money to help him on his way?"

I smiled at her simulated anxiety for my safety, and set forth when it was very dark but under a fine starry sky. The silence, too, was very profound: there was no good-bye from crowing cock or hooting owl on this occasion, nor did any cyclist pass me on the road with a flash of light from his lamp and a tinkle from his bell. The long straight road on the high down was a dim grey band visible but a few yards before me, lying across the intense blackness of the earth. By day I prefer as a rule walking on the turf, but this road had a rare and peculiar charm at this time. It was now the season when the bird's-foot-trefoil, one of the commonest plants of the downland country, was in its fullest bloom, so that in many places the green or grey-green turf as far as one could see on every side was sprinkled and splashed with orange-yellow. Now this creeping, spreading plant, like most plants that grow on the close-cropped sheep-walks, whose safety lies in their power to root themselves and live very close to the surface, yet must ever strive to lift its flowers into the unobstructed light and air and to overtop or get away from its crowding neighbours.

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