Where They All Came From I Cannot Think, There Seemed Such An Increase In Their Numbers; One Wet Morning In A Small Meadow There Were Forty-Five Feeding In Sight That Could Be Easily Counted.

They say the thrushes dig up and eat the roots of the arum, yet they are not root-eaters.

Possibly it may have a medicinal effect; the whole plant has very strong properties, and is still much gathered, I suppose for the herbalists. The root is set rather deep, quite a dig with a pocket knife sometimes; one would fancy it was only those which had become accidentally exposed that are eaten by the thrushes. I have never seen them do it, and some further testimony would be acceptable. The old naturalists said the bear on awakening from its winter sleep dug up and ate the roots of the arum in order to open the tube of the intestine which had flattened together during hibernation. The blackbirds are the thrushes' masters, and drive them from any morsel they fancy. There is very little humanity among them: one poor thrush had lost the joint of its leg, and in order to pick up anything had to support itself with one wing like a crutch. This bird was hunted from every spot he chose to alight on; no sooner did he enter the garden than one of the stronger birds flew at him - 'so misery is trodden on by many.' There was a drone-fly on a sunny wall on January 20, the commonest of flies in summer, quite a wonder then; the same day a house-sparrow was trying to sing, for they have a song as well as a chirp; on January 22 a tit was sharpening his saw and the gnats were jumping up and down in crowds - this up-and-down motion seems peculiar to them and may-flies. Then the snowdrops flowered and a hive-bee came to them; next the yellow crocus; bees came to these, too, and so eager were they that one bee would visit the same flower five or six times before finally going away. Bees are very eager for water in the early year; you may see them in crowds on the wet mud in ditches; there was a wild bee drowning in a basin of water the other day till I took him out.

Before the end of January the woodbine leaf was out, always the first to come, and never learning that it is too soon; whether the woodbine came over with 'Richard Conqueror' or the Romans, it still imagines itself ten degrees further south, so that some time seems necessary to teach a plant the alphabet. Immediately afterwards down came a north wind and put nature under its thumb for two months; the drone-fly hid himself, the bees went home, everything became shrivelled, dry, inhuman. The local direction of the wind might vary, but it was still the same polar draught, the blood-sucker; for, like a vampire, it sucks the very blood and moisture out of delicate human life, just as it dries up the sap in the branch.

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