full of
birds as the denser woodlands, where the oaks grow stronger on a stiff
clay soil. Here are no laughing yaffels, no cruel, murderous shrikes,
and very few song-birds. Still, there are always the pigeons and the
cushats, the wicked magpies and the screaming "jaypies," as the local
people call the jays. Then, too, there are the birds down among the
watercress and the brooklime in the clear pool below the spring,
moorhens occasionally awakening the echoes by running down a weird
chromatic scale or calling with their loud and mellow note to their
friends and relations over at the brook; here, too, the softer croak of
the mallard and the wild duck is also heard. A hawk, chasing some
smaller bird, is darting and hovering over the tops of the firs, but,
catching a glimpse of me, disappears from sight. Presently a little
bird, with an eye keener even than the cruel hawk's, comes out from the
hazels and perches on a post some ten yards away. It is a fly-catcher.
As he sits he turns his eyes in every direction, on the look-out for
dainty insects. He seems to have eyes at the back of his head, for
instantly he sees a fly in the air right behind him, makes a dash,
catches it, and flies on to the next post. He repeats the performance
there, then once more changes his ground. When he has made another
successful raid, he returns to his first post, always hunting in a
chosen circuit, and always catching flies. He was here yesterday, and
will be here again to-morrow. When you try to approach him, however, he
flies away and hides himself in the firs.

If there are not many birds in the woods just now, still, there is
always the beauty of the trees. How marvellous is the symmetry of form
and colouring in the trunk and branches of a big ash tree! If you put
mercury into a solution of nitrate of silver, and leave them for a few
days to combine, the result will be a precipitation of silver in a
lovely arborescent form, the _arbor Dianae_, beautiful beyond
description. Such are my favourite ash trees when the summer sunshine
sparkles on them. It is their bare, silvered trunks that give the
special charm to these hanging woods. They stand out from dark recesses
filled with alder and beech and ivy-mantled firs, rising in bold but
graceful outline; columns of silver, touched here and there with the sad
gold and green shades of lichen and moss. The moss that mingles with
golden lichens is of a soft, velvety hue, like a mantle of half drap