whipping a carthorse into a gallop; it soon dies away
in the old jog-trot. Why, they have actually started again--actually
started!'

He watched the teams a little longer, heedless of the wind, which he
abused, but which really did not affect him, and then walked along
the hedgerow downhill. Two men were sowing a field on the slope,
swinging the hand full of grain from the hip regular as time itself,
a swing calculated to throw the seed so far, but not too far, and
without jerk. The next field had just been manured, and he stopped
to glance at the crowds of small birds which were looking over the
straw--finches and sparrows, and the bluish grey of pied wagtails.
There were hundreds of small birds. While he stood, a hedge-sparrow
uttered his thin, pleading song on the hedge-top, and a
meadow-pipit, which had mounted a little way in the air, came down
with outspread wings, with a short 'Seep, seep,' to the ground. Lark
and pipit seem near relations; only the skylark sings rising,
descending, anywhere, but the pipits chiefly while slowly
descending. There had been a rough attempt at market-gardening in
the field after this, and rows of cabbage gone up to seed stood
forlorn and ragged. On the top of one of these a skylark was
perched, calling at intervals; for though classed as a non-percher,
perch he does sometimes. Meadows succeeded on the level ground; one
had been covered with the scrapings of roads, a whitish, crumbling
dirt, dry, and falling to pieces in the wind. The grass was pale,
its wintry hue not yet gone, and the clods seemed to make it appear
paler. Among these clods four or five thrushes were seeking their
food; on a bare oak a blackbird was perched, his mate no doubt close
by in the hedgerow; at the margin of a pond a black-and-white
wagtail waded in the water; a blue tit flew across to the corner.
Brown thrushes, dark blackbird, blue tit, and wagtail gave a little
colour to the angle of the meadow. A gleam of passing sunlight
brightened it. Two wood-pigeons came to a thick bush growing over a
grey wall on the other side--for ivy-berries, probably.

A cart passed at a little distance, laden with red mangolds, fresh
from the pit in which they had been stored; the roots had grown out
a trifle, and the rootlets were mauve. A goldfinch perched on a dry
dead stalk of wild carrot, a stalk that looked too slender to bear
the bird. As the weather-beaten man moved, the goldfinch flew, and
the golden wings outsprea