e path, the trees
drew back and let in a wide flood of daylight on to a circular lawn. It
was here that the noises had their origin. More than a score of peacocks
(there are altogether thirty at the farm), a proper contingent of
peahens, and a great multitude that I could not number of more ordinary
barn-door fowls, were all feeding together on this little open lawn
among the beeches. They fed in a dense crowd, which swayed to and fro,
and came hither and thither as by a sort of tide, and of which the
surface was agitated like the surface of a sea as each bird guzzled his
head along the ground after the scattered corn. The clucking, cooing
noise that had led me thither was formed by the blending together of
countless expressions of individual contentment into one collective
expression of contentment, or general grace during meat. Every now and
again a big peacock would separate himself from the mob and take a
stately turn or two about the lawn, or perhaps mount for a moment upon
the rail, and there shrilly publish to the world his satisfaction with
himself and what he had to eat. It happened, for my sins, that none of
these admirable birds had anything beyond the merest rudiment of a tail.
Tails, it seemed, were out of season just then. But they had their necks
for all that; and by their necks alone they do as much surpass all the
other birds of our grey climate as they fall in quality of song below
the blackbird or the lark. Surely the peacock, with its incomparable
parade of glorious colour and the scrannel voice of it issuing forth, as
in mockery, from its painted throat, must, like my landlady's
butterflies at Great Missenden, have been invented by some skilful
fabulist for the consolation and support of homely virtue: or rather,
perhaps, by a fabulist not quite so skilful, who made points for the
moment without having a studious enough eye to the complete effect; for
I thought these melting greens and blues so beautiful that afternoon,
that I would have given them my vote just then before the sweetest pipe
in all the spring woods. For indeed there is no piece of colour of the
same extent in nature, that will so flatter and satisfy the lust of a
man's eyes; and to come upon so many of them, after these acres of
stone-coloured heavens and russet woods, and grey-brown ploughlands and
white roads, was like going three whole days' journey to the southward,
or a month back into the summer.

I was sorry to leave "Peacock