Very few human beings know the full meaning of the word “still”—­not even bluejackets!—­but most of the wild-folk do.  They have to.  So did the thrush, but never before had he kept so utterly, stonily, frozenly, strickenly motionless.  If he had moved an eyelid even, winked, or gulped too hard, it would have been all up with him.  But he didn’t and it was not all up; though the kestrel seemed as if she were going to hover there, in that spot, through all eternity.  And when at last she condescended to surrender to the wind and vanish like a falling star into the horizon, our friend was as near nervous prostration and hysteria as a bird can be.  A very little longer and I believe he would actually have died from sheer overstrain, instead of from kestrel.

Then the thrush fed.  He did it against time, before dark, for if night came and caught him with an empty crop, he froze.  Perhaps he would freeze, anyway; but no matter.

The hen-chaffinches, presumably at the end of a journey, or part way along it, too, were in a like hurry, and for the same reason.  He could see them now only as faint splashes of white, as they opened tail and wing to fight; but they could not fight him, and he savagely kept the little clearing in the snow free of all save himself.  It was as if he knew that he was “up against it,” and the fact had developed a grim fierceness in his character.

An owl must have gone over about this time, because an owl did go over that garden about the same time every night; but perhaps she was not expecting thrushes in that gloom, or was in a hurry to keep an appointment with a rat.  Anyway, the owl did not develop.

Thereafter and at last the thrush went to sleep in a spruce-fir.

Dead silence reigned over the garden, and Cold, with a capital C, gripped the land.  Heaven help any bird who roosted on an empty stomach on such a night!  It would freeze to its perch before morning, most like.

Indeed, our thrush had a neighbor, a hedge-sparrow just newly arrived from “somewhere up north.”  It had come in after dark, and therefore had no time to feed.  The thrush just took his head out from under his wing and opened one eye, as the poor little beggar perched close to him for company.  He could see it plainly in the petrified moonlight.

When next he opened one eye and looked, dawn was at hand, and the poor little bird was still there.  When at last, with shoulders humped and feathers puffed, our thrush flew down to feed in the first pale-gold glimmer of very-much-diluted sunlight, the hedge-sparrow did not move.  Now, in opening his wings, possibly from a vague idea of frightening the hedge-sparrow away from the magic swept circle on the lawn close by, and its bread, the thrush brushed heavily against that hedge-sparrow, so that—­oh, horror!—­it fell, or swung over backwards, rather, and hung head downwards, swaying slightly, like a toy acrobat on a wire, before it fell, so rigidly and so stiffly immovable that one expected it to shatter to pieces like glass as it hit the ground.  It did not, however.  But it did not matter.  The hedge-sparrow was quite, quite dead before it fell, frozen stiff and stark in the night.  And none of the other birds seemed to care.  Why should they?  Such a fate might overtake themselves.