to care. Why should they? Such a fate
might overtake themselves.

The thrush, much tucked up, but still with some fight in him, was late.
Big flocks of peewits or green plover--he could see them between the
spruce-boughs--had gone drifting by, winking like floating silver, high
overhead, bound westward; and skylarks were passing over the garden,
one by one, heading southwest towards the warm, and chortling to each
other as they went. Starlings--some of them with extraordinarily
bright-yellow dagger-beaks, and some with dull beaks--were before him,
squabbling and sparring over the bread on the lawn. A robin dropped a
little chain of melancholy silvery notes, and a great titmouse bugled
clearly, "Ting-ling! Ting-ling! Ting-ling!" Some one opened a window
of the house giving on to the lawn, and the last house-fly blundered
out into the cold air; and a company of gnats--surely the most hardy of
insects--was dancing in the pale sunlight by the summer-house, _above
the snow_.

The opening of the window had erupted the starlings into the
surrounding trees, there to whistle and indulge in a "shiveree," such
as is dear to the heart of the excitable, social starling. And our
thrush was standing motionless in the middle of the swept circle on the
lawn almost at once. No one saw him go there. Indeed, unless the
observer looked closely, no one saw him at all, for even then he was,
unless he moved, difficult to see, and, whatever had been his custom
before, in those days he moved but little.

He had come at even to a garden given over to hen-chaffinches--no
cocks, as we said--but at dawn, or, rather, his later hour for rising,
he found the garden given over to song-thrushes, all pale beside him,
all slim, all snaky of build--Continental song-thrushes, most like, and
the same only come to those parts in very hard weather, for they come a
long way.

Our song-thrush, standing on his one leg, looked at them with one
shrewd eye. There were two of them in the snowless circle on the lawn,
which had been swept clear of the snow, that was now deep, before he
was up, and had also been replenished with bread. Two thrushes sat in
the spruce-fir, and one on the top of the summer-house, and every jack
of them was ravenous. He could expect no mercy from _them_. They must
live, if they could, and there was not enough food for all. And he
asked no mercy himself, either. Still, it was long odds.

Then he showed that he, even a b