In The Spring The Larks,
Passing From The Green Corn To The Pasture Within, Fluttering Over With
Gently Vibrating Wings And Singing As They Daintily Go, Sometimes Settle
On The Top.
There too the yellow-hammers stay.
In the crevices blue tits
build deep inside passages that abruptly turn, and baffle egg-stealers.
Partridges come over with a whir, but just clearing the top, gliding on
extended wings, which to the eye look like a slight brown crescent. The
waggoners who go by know that the great hawthorn bastions are favourite
resorts of wood-pigeons and missel-thrushes. The haws are ripe in autumn
and the ivy berries in spring, so that the bastions yield a double crop.
A mallow, the mauve petals of which even the dust of the road cannot
impair, flowers here and there on the dry bank below, and broad
moon-daisies among the ripe and almost sapless grass of midsummer.
If any one climbed the wall from the park and looked across at the plain
of corn-fields in early spring, everywhere there would be seen brown dots
in the air - above the first slender green blades; above the freshly
turned dark furrows; above the distant plough, the share of which,
polished like a silver mirror by friction with the clods, reflects the
sunshine, flashing a heliograph message of plenty from the earth;
everywhere brown dots, and each a breathing creature - larks ceaselessly
singing, and all unable to set forth their joy. Swift as is the vibration
of their throats, they cannot pour the notes fast enough to express their
eager welcome.
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