h in the water of the river pool with a loud "Splash!
splash!" Before the songsters have time to resume their interrupted
rivalry a missel thrush, the strident whistling butcher's boy of the
wood, appears round the corner, and, just like that blue-aproned youth,
he proceeds to cuff and abuse all the smaller fry, saying, "Yah! get
along! Who's your hatter? Does your mother know you're out?" and other
expressions of the rude, bullying youth of the streets. The missel
thrush is a born bully. It is not for nothing that he is called the
Storm Cock. It is more than suspected that he sucks eggs, and even
murder in the first degree--ornithologic infanticide--has been laid to
his charge. The smaller birds, at least, do not think him clear of this
latter count, for he has not appeared many minutes before he is beset by
a clamorous train of irate blue-tits, who go into an azure fume of
minute rage; sparrows also chase him, as vulgarly insolent as himself,
and robin redbreasts, persistent and perkily pertinacious, like spoiled
children allowed to wear their Sunday clothes on week-days.

_The Dust of Battle_.

So great is the dust of battle that it attracts a pair of hen harriers,
the pride of the instructed laird, and the special hatred of his head
keeper. Saunders Tod would shoot them if he thought that the laird would
not find out, and come down on him for doing it. He hates the "Blue
Gled" with a deep and enduring hatred, and also the brown female, which
he calls the "Ringtail." The Blue and the Brown, so unlike each other
that no ordinary person would take them for relatives, come sailing
swiftly with barely an undulation among the musical congregation. The
blackbird, wariest of birds--he on the top of the larch--has hardly time
to dart into the dark coverts of the underbrush, and the remainder of
the crew to disperse, before the Blue and the Brown sail among them
like Moorish pirates out from Salee. A sparrow is caught, but in
Galloway, at least, 'tis apparently little matter though a sparrow fall.
The harriers would have more victims but for the quick, warning cry of
the male bird, who catches sight of us standing behind the shining grey
trunk of the beech. The rovers instantly vanish, apparently gliding down
a sunbeam into the rising morning mist which begins to fill the valley.

_Comes the Day_.

Now we may turn our way homeward, for we shall see nothing further worth
our waiting for this morning. Every bird is now o