So far then I have wandered from the commonplace sweetness of the shorn fields, and I almost forgot to speak about the birds.  Watch the swallows as they gather together and talk with their low pretty twitter.  Their parliament has begun; and surely no one who watches their proceedings can venture to scoff at the transcendental argument which I have just now stated.  Those swift, pretty darlings will soon be flying through the pitchy gloom of the night, and they will dart over three or four thousand miles with unerring aim till they reach the far-off spot where they cheated our winter last year.  Some will nest amid the tombs of Egyptian kings, some will find out rosy haunts in Persia, some will soon be wheeling and twittering happily over the sullen breast of the rolling Niger.  Who—­ah, who guides that flight?  Think of it.  Man must find his way by the stars and the sun.  Day by day he must use elaborate instruments to find out where his vessel is placed; and even his instruments do not always save him from miles of error.  But the little bird plunges through the high gulfs of air and flies like an arrow to the selfsame spot where it lived before it last went off on the wild quest over shadowy continents and booming seas.  “Hereditary instinct,” says the scientific man.  Exactly so; and, if the swallow unerringly traverses the line crossed by its ancestors, even though the old land has long been whelmed in steep-down gulfs of the sea, does not that show us something?  Does it, or does it not, make my saying about the soul seem reasonable?

I have followed the swallows, but the fieldfares and the buntings must also go soon.  They will make their way South also, though some may go in leisurely fashion to catch the glorious burst of spring in Siberia.  I have been grievously puzzled and partly delighted by Mr. Seebohm’s account of the birds’ pilgrimage, and it has given me hours of thought.  We dwell amid mystery, and, as the leaves redden year by year, here recurs one of the chiefest mysteries that ever perplexed the soul of man.  Indeed, we are shadowed around with mystery and there is not one red leaf whirled by the wind among those moaning woods which does not represent a miracle.

We cannot fly from these shores, but our joys come each in its day.  For pure gladness and keen colour nothing can equal one of these glorious October mornings, when the reddened fronds of the brackens are silvered with rime, and the sun strikes flashes of delight from them.  Then come those soft November days when the winds moan softly amid the Aeolian harps of the purple hedgerows, and the pale drizzle falls ever and again.  Even then we may pick our pleasures discreetly, if we dwell in the country, while, as for the town, are there not pleasant fires and merry evenings?  Then comes the important thought of the poor.  Ah, it is woful! “‘Pleasant fires and merry evenings,’ say you?”—­so I can fancy some pinched sufferer saying, “What sort of merry evenings shall we have, when the fogs