estrel.

Then the thrush fed. He did it against time, before dark, for if night
came and caught him with an empty crop, he froze. Perhaps he would
freeze, anyway; but no matter.

The hen-chaffinches, presumably at the end of a journey, or part way
along it, too, were in a like hurry, and for the same reason. He could
see them now only as faint splashes of white, as they opened tail and
wing to fight; but they could not fight _him_, and he savagely kept the
little clearing in the snow free of all save himself. It was as if he
knew that he was "up against it," and the fact had developed a grim
fierceness in his character.

An owl must have gone over about this time, because an owl did go over
that garden about the same time every night; but perhaps she was not
expecting thrushes in that gloom, or was in a hurry to keep an
appointment with a rat. Anyway, the owl did not develop.

Thereafter and at last the thrush went to sleep in a spruce-fir.

Dead silence reigned over the garden, and Cold, with a capital C,
gripped the land. Heaven help any bird who roosted on an empty stomach
on such a night! It would freeze to its perch before morning, most
like.

Indeed, our thrush had a neighbor, a hedge-sparrow just newly arrived
from "somewhere up north." It had come in after dark, and therefore
had no time to feed. The thrush just took his head out from under his
wing and opened one eye, as the poor little beggar perched close to him
for company. He could see it plainly in the petrified moonlight.

When next he opened one eye and looked, dawn was at hand, and the poor
little bird was still there. When at last, with shoulders humped and
feathers puffed, our thrush flew down to feed in the first pale-gold
glimmer of very-much-diluted sunlight, the hedge-sparrow did not move.
Now, in opening his wings, possibly from a vague idea of frightening
the hedge-sparrow away from the magic swept circle on the lawn close
by, and its bread, the thrush brushed heavily against that
hedge-sparrow, so that--oh, horror!--it fell, or swung over backwards,
rather, and hung head downwards, swaying slightly, like a toy acrobat
on a wire, before it fell, so rigidly and so stiffly immovable that one
expected it to shatter to pieces like glass as it hit the ground. It
did not, however. But it did not matter. The hedge-sparrow was quite,
quite dead before it fell, frozen stiff and stark in the night. And
none of the other birds seemed