The Birds Had Apparently All
Been Blown Away And The Rabbits Were Staying At Home In Their
Burrows.
Not even an insect could I see, although the furze
was in full blossom; the honey-suckers were out of sight
and torpid, and the bloom itself could no longer look
"unprofitably gay," as the poet says it does.
"Not even a
wheatear!" I said, for I had counted on that bird in the
intervals between the storms, although I knew I should not
hear his wild delightful warble in such weather.
Then, all at once, I beheld that very bird, a solitary female,
flittering on over the flat ground before me, perching on the
little green ant-mounds and flirting its tail and bobbing as
if greatly excited at my presence in that lonely place. I
wondered where its mate was, following it from place to place
as it flew, determined now I had found a bird to keep it in
sight. Presently a great blackness appeared low down in the
cloudy sky, and rose and spread, travelling fast towards me,
and the little wheatear fled in fear from it and vanished from
sight over the rim of the down. But I was there to defy the
weather, and so instead of following the bird in search of
shelter I sat down among some low furze bushes and waited and
watched. By and by I caught sight of three magpies, rising
one by one at long intervals from the furze and flying
laboriously towards a distant hill-top grove of pines.
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