but even in man the seat of thought is so minute
that it escapes discovery, and his very life may be said to lie in
the point of contact of two bones of the neck. Put the mind of man
within the body of the caterpillar--what more could it have done?
Accustomed to bite and eat its way through hard leaves, why did not
the insect snip off and destroy its rope? These are matters to think
over dreamily while the finches sing overhead in the apple-tree.

They are not the only regular inhabitants, still less the only
visitors. As there are wide plains even in thickly populated England
where man has built no populous city, so in bird-life there are
fields and woods almost deserted by the songsters, who at the same
time congregate thickly in a few favourite resorts, where experience
gathered in slow time has shown them they need fear nothing from
human beings. Such a place, such a city of the birds and beasts, is
this old orchard. The bold and handsome bullfinch builds in the low
hawthorn hedge which bounds it upon one side. In the walls of the
arbour formed of thick ivy and flowering creepers, the robin and
thrush hide their nests. On the topmost branches of the tall
pear-trees the swallows rest and twitter. The noble blackbird, with
full black eye, pecks at the decaying apples upon the sward, and
takes no heed of a footstep. Sometimes the loving pair of squirrels
who dwell in the fir-copse at the end of the meadow find their way
down the hedges--staying at each tree as an inn by the road--into
the orchard, and play their fantastic tricks upon the apple-boughs.
The flycatchers perch on a branch clear from the tree, and dart at
the passing flies. Merriest of all, the tomtits chatter and scold,
hanging under the twigs, head downwards, and then away to their nest
in the crumbling stone wall which encloses one side of the orchard.
They have worked their way by a cranny deep into the thick wall. On
the other side runs the king's highway, and ever and anon the teams
go by, making music with their bells. One day a whole nation of
martins savagely attacked this wall. Pressure of population probably
had compelled them to emigrate from the sand quarry, and the chinks
in the wall pleased their eyes. Five-and-thirty brown little birds
went to work like miners at twelve or fourteen holes, tapping at the
mortar with their bills, scratching out small fragments of stone,
twittering and talking all the time, and there undoubtedly they
would hav