Field and Hedgerow | Page 6

the gorse of the garden hedge one morning, half hidden by the
stalks of old grasses. By-and-by it hopped out--the last thrush, so
distended with puffed feathers against the frost as to be almost
shapeless. He searched about hopelessly round the stones and in the
nooks, all hard and frostbound; there was the shell of a snail, dry and
whitened and empty, as was apparent enough even at a distance. His
keen eye must have told him that it was empty; yet such was his hunger
and despair that he took it and dashed it to pieces against a stone. Like
a human being, his imagination was stronger than his experience; he
tried to persuade himself that there might be something there; hoping
against hope. Mind, you see, working in the bird's brain, and
overlooking facts. A mere mechanism would have left the empty and
useless shell untouched--would have accepted facts at once, however
bitter, just as the balance on the heaviest side declines immediately,
obeying the fact of an extra grain of weight. The bird's brain was not
mechanical, and therefore he was not wholly mastered by experience. It
was a purely human action--just what we do ourselves. Next he came
across to the door to see if a stray berry still remained on a creeper. He
saw me at the window, and he came to the window--right to it--and
stopped and looked full at me some minutes, within touch almost,
saying as plainly as could be said, 'I am starving--help me.' I never
before knew a thrush make so unmistakable an appeal for assistance, or
deliberately approach so near (unless previously encouraged). We tried
to feed him, but we fear little of the food reached him. The wonder of
the incident was that a thrush should still be left--there had not been

one in the garden for two months. Berries all gone, ground hard and
foodless, streams frozen, snow lying for weeks, frost stealing away the
vital heat--ingenuity could not devise a more terrible scene of torture to
the birds. Neither for the thrushes nor for the new-born infants in the
tent did the onslaught of the winter slacken. No pity in earth or heaven.
This one thrush did, indeed, by some exceptional fortune, survive; but
where were the family of thrushes that had sung so sweetly in the rainy
autumn? Where were the blackbirds?
Looking down from the stilts of seven hundred feet into the deep
coombe of black oaks standing in the white snow, day by day, built
round about with the rugged mound of the hills, doubly locked with the
key of frost--it seemed to me to take on itself the actuality of the
ancient faith of the Magi. How the seeds of all living things--the
germs--of bird and animal, man and insect, tree and herb, of the whole
earth--were gathered together into a four-square rampart, and there laid
to sleep in safety, shielded by a spell-bound fortification against the
coming flood, not of water, but of frost and snow! With snow and frost
and winter the earth was overcome, and the world perished, stricken
dumb and dead, swept clean and utterly destroyed--a winter of the gods,
the silence of snow and universal death. All that had been passed away,
and the earth was depopulated. Death triumphed. But under the snow,
behind the charmed rampart, slept the living germs. Down in the deep
coombe, where the dark oaks stood out individually in the whiteness of
the snow, fortified round about with immovable hills, there was the
actual presentment of Zoroaster's sacred story. Locked in sleep lay bud
and germ--the butterflies of next summer were there somewhere, under
the snow. The earth was swept of its inhabitants, but the seeds of life
were not dead. Near by were the tents of the gipsies--an Eastern race,
whose forefathers perhaps had seen that very Magian worship of the
Light; and in those tents birth had already taken place. Under the Night
of winter--under the power of dark Ahriman, the evil spirit of
Destruction--lay bud and germ in bondage, waiting for the coming of
Ormuzd, the Sun of Light and Summer. Beneath the snow, and in the
frozen crevices of the trees, in the chinks of the earth, sealed up by the
signet of frost, were the seeds of the life that would replenish the air in
time to come. The buzzing crowds of summer were still under the
snow.

This forest land is marked by the myriads of insects that roam about it
in the days of sunshine. Of all the million million heathbells--multiply
them again by a million million more--that purple the acres of rolling
hills, mile upon mile, there is not one that is not daily visited by these
flying creatures. Countless and incalculable hosts of the yellow-barred