light once now and
then on a crab or a wild apple, with its broad rosy petals showing
behind the hawthorn. On the 7th I heard a corncrake in the meadow
over Thames, opposite the Promenade, a hundred yards below
Messenger's Eyot. It is a favourite spot with the corncrake--almost
the only place where you are nearly sure to hear him. Crake! crake!
So it is now high May, and now midnight. Antares is visible--the
summer star.

VIGNETTES FROM NATURE

I.--SPRING

The soft sound of water moving among thousands of grass-blades is to
the hearing as the sweetness of spring air to the scent. It is so
faint and so diffused that the exact spot whence it issues cannot be
discerned, yet it is distinct, and my footsteps are slower as I
listen. Yonder, in the corners of the mead, the atmosphere is full
of some ethereal vapour. The sunshine stays in the air there as if
the green hedges held the wind from brushing it away. Low and
plaintive comes the notes of a lapwing; the same notes, but tender
with love.

On this side by the hedge the ground is a little higher and dry,
hung over with the lengthy boughs of an oak which give some shade. I
always feel a sense of regret when I see a seedling oak in the
grass. The two green leaves--the little stem so upright and
confident, and though but a few inches high, already so completely a
tree--are in themselves beautiful. Power, endurance, grandeur are
there; you can grasp all with your hand and take a ship between the
finger and thumb. Time, that sweeps away everything, is for a while
repelled: the oak will grow when the time we know is forgotten, and
when felled will be mainstay and safety of a generation in a future
century. That the plant should start among the grass to be severed
by the scythe, or crushed by cattle, is very pitiful; I cannot help
wishing that it could be transplanted and protected. O! the
countless acorns that drop in autumn not one in a million is
permitted to become a tree: a vast waste of strength and beauty.
From the bushes by the stile on the left hand (which I have just
passed) follows the long whistle of a nightingale. His nest is near;
he sings night and day. Had I waited on the stile, in a few minutes,
becoming used to my presence, he would have made the hawthorn
vibrate, so powerful is his voice when heard close at hand. There is
not another nightingale along this path for at least a mile, though
it crosses meadows and runs by hedges to all appearance e