gazing on such a landscape the brown, harsh, scanty vegetation of the hilltop seemed all the more grateful.  The heath was an oasis and a refuge; I rambled about in it until my feet and legs were wet; then I sat down to let them dry and altogether spent several agreeable hours at that spot, pleased at the thought that no human fellow-creature would intrude upon me.  Feathered companions were, however, not wanting.  The crowing of cock pheasants from the thicket beside the old road warned me that I was on preserved grounds.  Not too strictly preserved, however, for there was my old friend the carrion-crow out foraging for his young.  He dropped down over the trees, swept past me, and was gone.  At this season, in the early summer, he may be easily distinguished, when flying, from his relation the rook.  When on the prowl the crow glides smoothly and rapidly through the air, often changing his direction, now flying close to the surface, anon mounting high, but oftenest keeping nearly on a level with the tree tops.  His gliding and curving motions are somewhat like those of the herring-gull, but the wings in gliding are carried stiff and straight, the tips of the long flight-feathers showing a slight upward curve.  But the greatest difference is in the way the head is carried.  The rook, like the heron and stork, carries his beak pointing lance-like straight before him.  He knows his destination, and makes for it; he follows his nose, so to speak, turning neither to the right nor the left.  The foraging crow continually turns his head, gull-like and harrier-like, from side to side, as if to search the ground thoroughly or to concentrate his vision on some vaguely seen object.

Not only the crow was there:  a magpie chattered as I came from the brake, but refused to show himself; and a little later a jay screamed at me, as only a jay can.  There are times when I am intensely in sympathy with the feeling expressed in this ear-splitting sound, inarticulate but human.  It is at the same time warning and execration, the startled solitary’s outburst of uncontrolled rage at the abhorred sight of a fellow-being in his woodland haunt.

Small birds were numerous at that spot, as if for them also its wildness and infertility had an attraction.  Tits, warblers, pipits, finches, all were busy ranging from place to place, emitting their various notes now from the tree-tops, then from near the ground; now close at hand, then far off; each change in the height, distance, and position of the singer giving the sound a different character, so that the effect produced was one of infinite variety.  Only the yellow-hammer remained constant in one spot, in one position, and the song at each repetition was the same.  Nevertheless this bird is not so monotonous a singer as he is reputed.  A lover of open places, of commons and waste lands, with a bush or dwarf tree for tower to sit upon, he is yet one of the most common species in the thickly timbered country of the Otter, Clyst, and Sid, in which I had been rambling, hearing him every day and all day long.  Throughout that district, where the fields are small, and the trees big and near together, he has the cirl-bunting’s habit of perching to sing on the tops of high hedgerow elms and oaks.