The man who knows Exmoor only in the pride of its summer beauty, who has, it may be, followed the staghounds over its far-reaching slopes through a splendour of heath and ling and blossomed furze, who has never seen the broad shoulders of Dunkery save when they were wrapped about with royal purple, would find the moorland now in very different mood, would think it even now, far on towards the summer, desolate and sad-coloured and forlorn. The gorse, indeed, is in its prime. Its fragrant gold is as full of beauty as when the mingled mob of horse and foot and carriages gathers, for the first Meet of the season, on the smooth crown of Cloutsham Ball.

The gorse is a flower of the year. It is in bloom even in January. There is an old saw that declares it to be, like kissing, never out of season. But the heather that covers so much of the slopes of Dunkery wears at this moment its very somberest of hues. Standing on the fringe of the moorland, on the brink of one of the deep glens that run into the heart of the hills, and looking up the slope towards the dark summit, one might think that winter was not over even yet. There is a touch of vivid green here and there, round the birthplace of some mountain stream. There is colour on the young birches that one by one are feeling their way up out of the hollow. But in the sober brown of the heather, in the pearl grey of the peat moss, in the dark hue of the gaunt and twisted pines scattered at far intervals in front of the advancing forest, there is no sign of the sweet influences of the spring.

A lonely spot. There is not a house in sight, no farm, no hedgerow, no sign of man's dominion anywhere, beyond faint traces of bridle paths, like dark lines along the heath, or a broader track whose warm red shows a moment as it climbs some rising of the moor. A solitary skylark sings over the brown heather. At times a buzzard wails, as on broad wings he drifts in mighty circles overhead, a dark spot against the pale blue heaven. Sounds like these but deepen the sense of loneliness. But there is charm in the very solitude. There is charm in the dark heath and in the golden furze—in the play of the cloud-shadows that each moment change the tones of brown and green and grey. There is charm in the sweet breath of the gorse, and above all, in the bright, fresh air of the open moorland. And however bare and voiceless these sombre slopes, each hollow that wanders away into the hills is filled to overflowing with a sea of mingled foliage, all astir with life and movement.

The path that leads down from the highland to the hollow looks upon a different world. The steep sides of the glen are green to the very brim, are covered, right up to the brown fringe of heather, with noble oaks in the pride of fresh, young foliage, among whose golden green, all shimmering in a haze of sunlight, shows the shadowy grey of boughs still bare, and in the open spaces are all carpeted with the rich red of dead bracken, or the vivid green of bilberry leaves. From far below, out of the mist of green and grey, rises the song of a swift mountain stream, whose pools and white cascades and brawling rapids gleam among the trees like scattered links of silver.

There is a sudden clatter of stones upon the farther slope. Two stags and four attendant hinds are making their way up from Horner Water. They pause and look this way; the head of the leader lifted, his antlers clear against the foliage behind him. This is Exmoor. Here the red deer are on their native heath. This is their last stronghold south of the Border. And it is in glens like this that they find the sanctuary they love. The noble beasts stand long at gaze. At last the leader turns, and moves slowly up the slope, the others falling into line behind him. They quicken the pace as they gain more easy ground, and breaking into a canter, wind in gallant style across the heath. They pause for a last look as they reach the summit of the ridge, their figures darkly cut against the sky.

The road sinks lower, lower yet, down into the green heart of the glen. Noble trees they are that fill the hollow. Some have long since passed their prime. Their mighty branches are thick with moss and lichen, and fringed with green tongues of fern. In rifts that time and storm have carved in their huge columns, rowan and bramble and young holly trees are rooted. Grey arms of ivy, almost as broad and vigorous as they, are twined with fatal clasp about their sturdy stems. Where the pathway crosses at the ford, there stands a blasted tree: a giant oak, whose top, wrecked and shattered though it is, rises high above its forest brothers. Its bark has all fallen away. Its bare limbs glimmer ghost-like through the green gloom.

The whole glen is full of life. Solitude there may be, but not silence. The air is musical with the ripple of the stream, and with the songs of sweet-voiced warblers. Over the tree tops clamorous daws are passing, and the light wings of homeward-flying doves. Among the boulders that winter floods have heaped along the torrent—that even now, before the patient, eternal, resistless chafing of the water, are moving slowly down the stream—you may startle a heron from his noonday dreaming. Or you may come unaware upon a pair of wild ducks, paddling softly on one of the smooth and sheltered reaches, the mallard still splendid in the nuptial plumage he is so soon to lose. Only a few weeks longer will he wear it. Summer will find him in a quiet-coloured garb, a suit of brown and grey as plain and unpretending as the dress of his sober-tinted mate.

This, too, is the dipper's haunt. Again and again you will meet him on his way up stream, flying swift and straight, with sharp note of warning on spying a stranger near his fishing grounds. Or you may watch him as he stands on some small island in the torrent, his white breast gleaming like a patch of silver in the water under him, bowing and calling, and now breaking off into that sweet, wild song so dear to the soul of the fisherman. The dipper's nest of moss and leaves and withered sedges, hidden deftly in some old stump by the shore, is empty and deserted. His mate and he are out all day on the river with their little mob of dusky children.

It is a pleasant path that winds leisurely along the glen, now wandering with the stream, now passing it by a ford, now loitering among the trees, now fenced on either hand with tall thickets of gorse and briar and hawthorn, now keeping close by the grey willows that overhang the water. It is not a wide stream to cross, for all the rain. The deer, whose fresh footmarks are printed deep in the moist earth all along its banks, can easily leap over it. The squirrels on their airy highway along meeting oak boughs far above it, have no need to think of it at all. But for the rabbits there is no way over but through the stream itself. And here, a few days since, a rabbit, startled from the herbage on the brink, took to the water without a moment's hesitation; a mere baby of a rabbit, so small and slight that it was carried along for yards by the swift current before it could get into shallow water and struggle up the bank.

Suddenly two birds rise soaring from the trees, better seen when they are clear of the valley, and sharply drawn against the sky. One slow-winged and heavy, one quick and active, and deft in every movement. A crow and a sparrow-hawk. They are fighting. Sounds of battle float downwards through the air—the fierce defiance of the hawk, the hoarse answer of his black antagonist. Round and round they go, wheeling, sinking, soaring, now the hawk uppermost, and now the crow. To watch the skilful manœuvres of the hawk, one might think there was little doubt about the issue. How easily he sweeps past his lumbering enemy, how he clutches at him with talons, how he flouts him with his strong wings. Yet the crow, for all his awkwardness, is armed with no mean weapon. The hawk knows well the value of that black dagger of a bill. And so they drift over the rim of the valley to the open moorland, fighting to the last.

High up on the moorland, in a wilderness of dead heather—surely beyond all power of spring-time to call back to life—with dead gorse bushes scattered over it, gaunt and spectral, unlighted by any touch of golden bloom, there stands an ancient grave-mound. It is the merest flaw in the wide landscape. A roadway passes near it. But from elsewhere, unless it chanced to cut the sky line, you might search for it in vain. Looking across the grassy rim of the hollow space within it, a space like the crater of some spent volcano, you see nothing but the pale summer sky above you, and, stretching away on every side, a waste of desolate, far-reaching undulations, to whose wintry hues the scanty patches of grass and the tender tone of the late bilberry plants have hardly, even yet, lent any tinge of green.

This is the very heart of the wilderness. There is not a house in sight. There are no fields, no fences, no horses, no red cattle, not a sheep even; no single moving figure, save of a bird that flits restlessly among the gorse. This is almost as bleak and bare a landscape as the haunt of the "Dead Drummer" upon Salisbury Plain.

Yet it is a beautiful landscape, still and lonely though it be. There is no gold of blossomed gorse, no rich Tyrian of early heather. But there is marvellous wealth of colour even in these sheets of dead ling, whose varied greys and browns are strengthened here to deep shades of purple, and there,—by a carpet of withered brake fern, beaten down by wind and rain, and with stout young fronds but just beginning to uncurl,—are fairly kindled into red. At one point a belt of dry sedges gleams like a grey river. At another a patch of vivid green betrays the birthplace of some moorland stream. Round the old hawthorns, dotted here and there over the waste, a green mist is gathering. But the starved and stunted trees of this high upland country are slow to answer to the sunshine, and there are hardly leaves enough yet to hide the shaggy tufts of lichen, silver grey and golden yellow, that hang so thickly on the boughs. In the thorny depths of these storm-beaten trees, even carrion crows venture to build fastnesses, fearing nothing, though with thresholds not six feet above ground, short of an avenging volley from the keeper's gun.

As the hours go by you grow conscious, by degrees, of companions of your solitude. You hear notes of larks and pipits as they flit here and there among the heather. You catch the faint far call of a wandering cuckoo. A stone-chat settles near, on a tall, dead furze bush, and sings over and over his brief roundelay. There are few dwellers on the heath more smart than he, with his coal-black head, his neat white collar, and his ruddy breast. This, too, is the native heath of yonder curlews, wheeling idly across the sky, sounding now and then that musical, clear call, that is one of the most characteristic voices of the moorland.

The black-cock, the true children of the wilderness, are lying close among the heather. The grey dawn is the time to see them best, when they come down to drink and bathe at favourite points along the streams. Towards nightfall, too, you will hear on all sides, but especially on the fringe of the wooded valleys where they come to feed, their strange, hoarse crying, which it is hard to credit is the note of bird at all. In the twilight each old black-cock will take his stand on some hillock, or even on the level ground, and spreading wide his splendid tail, drooping his wings, and sinking his head, like a stag preparing to give battle, will utter strange, almost weird, sounds, which, as you watch his odd figure, and fantastic attitudes, you would hardly think were meant as notes of challenge to his rivals, intended to be full of defiance and contempt.

Beyond the white cart-track, that just shows for a moment before it sinks behind a rising in the heath, runs a deep valley—a great hollow filled almost to the brim with oaks and beeches and tall larch trees;—they, at least, are in the full pride of their magnificent young beauty, with long branches thickly hung with tufts of fragrant green. It is a valley of streams, that, drawn in silver threads from every hill-slope near, set all along with alder and willow, with ferns and rushes, and cool water plants, go plunging through at last out of the narrow gateway of the glen, to widen farther down into a broad, smooth flood, that sweeps in silence among the worn stepping-stones of a village way.

The valley is full of life; full as the moorland here is bare of it. In the great bank that skirts the wood badgers have their holt. Hard by it is a famous "earth," to which every hunted fox for miles round flees for sanctuary. The woodmen have been busy here. The ground is strewn with red larch chips, whose sweet, resinous fragrance hangs heavy on the air. And from the welcome rest of some new-felled tree, whose shorn plumes lie heaped about it in well-ordered faggots, you may listen to the pleasant voices of the doves, and the blithe notes of warblers in the boughs above you. You may watch the pheasants stalking solemnly among the underwood, may see the brown squirrels romping on the grass, or playing follow the leader up and down the smooth-stemmed beech trees. A charméd spot. A spot such as the poet sang of, who

The red deer love this quiet glen. You may see their sharp footprints along every woodman's path, and by the oozy marge of every stream. Their hour is not yet. Like the fox and the badger, they are lovers of the twilight. It is not till evening darkens that they leave their lairs in the cool depths of the larch copse or the shadowy heart of the oak plantation, and cross the high dyke that parts the farm lands from the cover, and sally out to raid the young corn and the turnips in outlying fields. This is the Red Deer Country. Empty as the landscape is at noon, there are times when this wild heath is all alive with moving figures, horse and hound, and all the bravery of the shouting chase. Many a time has the hunt swept past this solitary tumulus, the gallant stag seen for a moment, perhaps, upon the sky line, as

There is no hamlet for miles around but has its legends, old and new, of a sport that is dear to all the country side. In one of the moorland churches it is recorded how, some six hundred years since, a villager slew one of the King's deer; how the culprit was "not found," and how, in the end, four neighbouring parishes paid fine to the royal foresters. It is but a mile as the crow flies to a hamlet, lying deep in a hollow of the hills, where last year, when the chase went thundering through the quiet street, the stag, in his despair, sought refuge in the inn, and was pulled down by the hounds within the doorway of the hostelry. It is the most picturesque of inns, with its rambling buildings, its thatched roofs, mossed and lichen stained, its tiny dormer windows, and a sign that has puzzled many an idler on the village green;—uncertain whether, as some would have it, the figure in scarlet is meant for a woman seated on a stile; whether it is a nabob mounted on an elephant; or whether, as the words that run above it would suggest, it is a Roundhead trooper drawing rein under the oak of Boscobel.

Down a deep valley in the West Country winds a swift moorland stream. Mile after mile of sombre, heath-clad solitudes stretch away on either side of it, broken with gorse and bracken, and with here and there a few stunted and storm-beaten trees. Well-ordered farm lands slope down to it. At far intervals it roars under the ancient bridges of solitary hamlets. Here, in the heart of the great hills, it runs between wooded slopes, covered with thick growth of sturdy oak trees—leafless still, but with purple of fast opening blossoms that, with the rich red brown of dead leaves and withered fern about their feet, lends to the whole glen a glow of warmth and colour.

Here the red deer steal out after sundown over the ruinous wall and through the untended hedgerow to the broad meadow that for a space divides the river from the wood. Here in the twilight the otters play, rolling over and over in the water like great grey cats. The beautiful moorland sheep that lift their horned heads to watch the solitary wayfarer, with half-curious, half-supercilious gaze, seem hardly less the true creatures of the wild than the grey rabbit that you startle from his noonday dreaming among the long grass by the hedgerow, or than the brown squirrel, coming down for a frolic on the soft, green turf.

Below the wooded slope runs the river, here foaming over great blocks of stone lying prostrate in its bed, there eddying round a jutting bar of rock, now loitering in quiet backwaters, where dead leaves and tufts of grass and all the smaller flotsam of the stream spin slowly on the tranquil surface. At one point it roars through a narrow channel between two ponderous stones, which lie calm and unmoved in all the headlong rush; at another it pauses, silent, in a deep, dark pool. Now it is broken all across in a tumultuous cataract, and now again it widens to a broad sheet of waving glass. At a bend in the river bank—a little hollow worn by the floods of many winters—three alders overhang. And at their feet, close to the margin of the stream, sheltered by a screen of strong young branches growing upward from the base of the trees, is a pleasant resting-place from which to watch unseen the life and movement of this bird-haunted hollow—the warblers that throng the thickets by the shore, the dippers that on swift wings pass and repass along the watery highway, the graceful wagtails that with dainty steps run up and down upon the strips of sand.

Looking down from the edge of the slope at the far end of the meadow, framed by the broad arms of giant trees, show the buildings of a farm, that with its wide eaves and crested gables, its deep-sunk dormer windows, its rows of hives, and its ruinous sheds, is a picture in itself. Close by it one of the moorland highways, a narrow country lane, slopes steeply down, crossing the river by a ford. And by the road, its grey masonry clearly drawn against the shadowy spires of thick-growing alder trees, is an old stone bridge—so old that no clue remains, no legend even, to its history or its builders. Two thousand years, perhaps, has the river run beneath these ponderous slabs of stone, laid flat across rude, unmortared piers.

Beyond the bridge, through a purple mist of branches, show silver glimpses of the river, then a broad stretch of meadow with dark pine woods above it, among which the young larch foliage floats in feathery clouds of green, and above these again, the brown and desolate moorland. Near the bridge a little party of wanderers have made their camp. The blue smoke of their fire drifts slowly this way, with the pleasant scent of burning pine wood, the pleasanter voices of girls and the shouts of children. It is a perfect day for camping in the open; with warm air, and blue sky, and soft white clouds sailing slowly over,—a day of clear shining after rain.

The air over the stream is full of insect life, of flies of many shapes and various hues, of browns, and drakes, and duns, so dear to the brown river trout; and, in counterfeit presentment at any rate, almost dearer to the soul of the trout-fisher. And as you watch the myriad wingèd things that sail along the water, that settle on the warm stones, or on the alder boughs, or even on your hand, you will think it small ground for wonder that the thickets by the stream should be so full of birds.

One might think that the roar of the river would be enough to drown all other sounds. But, clear above it rise the notes of tits and finches and warblers. The breezy chatter of the swallows, the call of the dipper, the woodwren's hasty little stave of song, the whistle of the blackbird, the mellow call of the cuckoo, are as plain as if the great voice of the river were not heard at all. In the next tree two finches have alighted; their restless movements and sharp challenge of alarm betraying only too plainly what they are so anxious to conceal, that their nest is somewhere near. Two beautiful birds they are; one with the red flush on his breast, the broad bar of white in either wing, the slate-blue feathers of his lifted crest. The other, hardly less charming, with all her colours pitched in soberer key. With anxious and persistent iteration of their one shrill note of protest, they flit from branch to branch; and when you rise, and peer into the tangle of ivy-mantled boughs above you, the birds grow more clamorous still. There is the nest, its mossy cup woven deftly among the slender twigs, studded all over with lichen points of silver—as ever, a miracle of beauty.

There are many birds preparing for the great event of the year. It is not for nothing, you may be sure, that that old blackbird has stayed out at the same corner of the hedge every day for a week past; there is some good reason for his stealing towards it now across the wood, a moving shadow, quiet for once. We can read the signs of the times in the notes of the birds no less than in the heightened colours of their plumage. It is a love-song pure and simple that yonder hedge sparrow, poised on a straying spray of bramble, is singing so softly to himself. The ringing call of an oxeye overhead never was more clear, and blithe, and musical. But the soft notes of a flock of long-tailed tits, not yet disbanded, have a still softer tone to-day. Their light-hearted gossip seems subdued and low, as if they knew the days were near when every woodlander will go about his work with all the stealth he may. There is a gold-crest rummaging among the ivy that clings about an old elm hard by, almost within arm's length, so near that the touch of vivid yellow on his crown gleams like very gold.

Smoke is still rising from the white ashes of the fire, but it is proof enough that the little group has moved away, and that no one is visible from the highway of the river, when a kingfisher flashes across the bridge, straight up the stream, a swift gleam of azure through the sunlit air. As you follow its flight to the bend where the river vanishes behind its fringing alders, you are aware of a moving point of light on one of the great boulders far out from shore. Then the shape of a dipper shows clearly on the top of the stone. A moment later it dives straight down into the water, reappearing some yards nearer this way, pausing on another great block of sandstone, to bow and curtsey, uttering now and then a loud, clear note, its white gorget glowing like a star, whiter even than the very foam of the river. Now it swims lightly across a smooth backwater. Now it works its way sidelong across a rapid rush of the current, stooping now and then to pick some dainty morsel from among the stones, and all the while moving slowly with the stream, until at last it stands on a stone in mid-channel, not thirty yards away—a graceful, charming, dainty little figure, the very naiad of the mountain stream.

But alas, there is another spectator of its movements. Across the meadow sails a dark, hawk-like figure, swift and silent, disappearing in the oak wood on the farther shore. In a moment every voice is hushed. Not a bird calls. Not even a wren dares to utter an alarm. There is a sudden rush of wings. A merlin dashes from the thicket by the shore, catches up the dipper in its cruel claws, and, alighting on a great flat stone, in the middle of the river, it buries its merciless bill again and again in the white breast of its struggling captive. What a picture! The sunlight is full on the blue back of the beautiful little falcon, as it leans forward a little, half hiding its prey under its drooping wings. Giving a swift glance to right and left—the sparkle of its keen eyes plain to see—it tears out a little cloud of feathers that flutter lightly down, and sail away upon the stream. Again the merlin looks up. Something has startled him. He gives one glance this way. He catches sight of a figure under the alder trees. Like a flash he is gone. The dead dipper falls into the water, sailing down the river, in which but a few minutes since it was playing, full of life and happiness, the white feathers from its blood-stained gorget floating away from it at every swirl of the current; a sorrowful little heap of ruffled plumage, whirling with the whirling stream.

On the slopes of a great hollow in the heart of Exmoor, a hot sun beats fiercely down. True that it is an April sky whose clouds and sunshine weave their changing web of lights and shadows over the landscape. True that the landscape, even yet, wears but little of the guise of springtime. But to-day no touch of east is in the air, and the smoke columns, rising slowly from the chimneys of the village, and showing so blue against the oak plantation on a distant shoulder of the moorland, are drifting slowly from the southward. From this upland country, over which the snow lay deep for two whole months, the grip of winter has been slow to loosen. But the trees and hedgerows are answering at last to the magical influence of the sunshine, and "the useful trouble of the rain." The grass of these rich meadow lands—for months past all burnt and brown, as if after a long, rainless summer—wears now its very loveliest hue. There is a fringe of pale blue violets along the edge of every woodland path. Stars of celandine are scattered over every field, and among the tangle of the withered hedge-row grasses. Marsh marigolds are gleaming in the wet earth about the roots of the alders by the river. Even at this distance, the great clumps of primroses show like points of light on the slope of the orchard by the vicarage. Surely never were there such beautiful masses of wood-sorrel as, with their vivid leaves and dainty, purple-veined flowers, brighten now the banks of every deep-worn lane.

The tall chestnut by the church, but yesterday just dusted over with fine points of gold, is now a very cloud of fresh young foliage. Each day strengthens the green hue of the larches crowning the bold spur beyond the village. Each day deepens the warm purple of fast-opening blossoms round the heads of the tall elms of the village, and the great oaks of this warm slope. Noble trees they are, these hoary patriarchs that the woodman's axe has spared. Their mighty branches, gnarled and twisted and storm-beaten, towering far up against the pale blue heaven, are shaggy with ages' growth of lichens. Moss grows thick over the furrowed rind, not of their broad stems alone, but almost of their topmost branches. In the crannies of the bark, fringed with grey-green tongues of fern, woodbine and briar and slim mountain-ash have found anchorage. Over their old arms the nuthatches wander up and down, calling to each other with that loud musical trill so characteristic of the springtime.

On every side, among the broad stumps of vanished forest monarchs, long dethroned, are springing the sturdy forms of another generation, young pines and oaks and beeches, that are doing their best to fill the places of the fallen, and although the giant sycamore that overhangs the path is still all bare and leafless, everywhere in the grass beneath its shadow, its children, tiny double blades of tender green, are springing, thousands strong.

It is a scene of marvellous beauty upon which the eye looks down from the welcome rest of this fallen tree beside the woodland path. Below, at the foot of the slope, the border line between the wild life of the covert and the order of the well-kept farm lands, runs a swift moorland stream, whose broad band of silver is broken again and again by the rude stone bridges of the village streets. Every reach of the river seems to have its several sound, that,

seems, with the rush of the wind among the rocking tops, and with the songs and call-notes of a hundred birds, to fill the hollow. In the pauses of the roar of the white lasher by the mill, a roar that sinks and swells with every flaw that blows, the ear may catch now the sound of the swift current brawling over its brown pebbles, now the swirl of water round a bar of shingle, now the chafing of the stream among the alder roots, and now the soft sound of ripples on a sandy shallow. Round the broad green knoll that rises from the river, filling all the centre of the valley, and almost islanded by wandering streams, cluster the houses of the hamlet, whose white walls and brown and moss-grown roofs of thatch, whose pointed gables and quaint deep-sunk dormer windows show plainly now among sheltering elms, that in the summer-time will hide them in a very bower of green.

High over the roofs of the village, high even above the topmost trees, rises the grey tower of the church. Round its turrets a troop of daws are fluttering. Is it only fancy, or is there really a note of protest and impatience in their snatches of clear-cut speech? For weeks past these bold frequenters of the church have been piling sticks upon the turret stair, by way of foundation for their great untidy nests. They had strewn a cartload of rubbish over the floor of the belfry, when the sexton arose in his wrath and blocked up all the tower windows and the loophole lights of the stairway, so that the daws were compelled to change their quarters to the roofs of the village. But they still linger round their ancestral homestead, and one pair, determined not to quit altogether the sacred precincts that have sheltered them and theirs for generations, have established themselves in a niche behind the iron pipe of the stove. It is a hole that might just contain the nest, but the birds have thought it necessary to fill up with sticks a yard or more of the space between the chimney and the tower wall, as if by way of outworks to their fortress.

A flood of sunshine is falling at this moment on the ancient tower, on the brown thatch of the old houses, on the purple lacework of the budding elms, until the whole beautiful picture stands clear-drawn against the soft background of the far hillside, still all in shadow. The sunlight glitters on the slate roofs of houses lower down, and flashes on the winding river until every reach of it is a sheet of burnished silver. Now it brightens yet more the vivid green of the meadows, now it touches the red slopes of distant corn-lands, and now it seems to linger on a far shoulder of the moor, whose brown heath and dead grey gorse bushes, and ancient thorn trees straggling up the hill, are transfigured to a very vision of glory by the dreamy, sunlit haze.

Dream-like, too, is the quiet that broods over this peaceful valley—a quiet even deepened by those Voices Three, of the wind, and the birds, and the river. No sound of toil or traffic rises from the village, save the clink of iron in the smithy, the thud of a woodman's axe among the young alders by the water, or, still more rarely, the lumbering of a cart along one of the deep lanes that slope upward to the moor, or that wander with the winding streams. The wind that sways the oak boughs overhead has a stormy sound. But this sheltered corner under the hill, with its screen of thick-growing fir and holly, is full of the warm south, of soft and gentle airs, scented with the sweet resinous fragrance of the pines.

And all the while, louder than the rush of the wind, clearer far than the sound of the river, there float from tree to tree the happy voices of the woodland singers. Everywhere among the leafless boughs the chiff-chaffs are calling. Here and there along the slope a tree pipit, rising high above his station upon some yet wintry branch, sinks slowly downward through the sunny air, singing as he sinks, till he alights again upon his windy perch. Loud above all other sounds there strikes in now and then the whistle of a blackbird, wild and clear, and at times the yet sweeter carol of the blackcap. Rooks call hoarsely to each other as they pass, on the way to their great settlement far down the river. At times the white pigeons of the vicarage, hovering a moment in mid-air, descend like a shower of snowflakes on their dovecot. From the shelter of the old Scotch firs at the far end of the wood, where the trees have long been left untouched, come now and then the deep notes of carrion crows, low-toned, sullen, unmirthful. They are ill neighbours for all the weaker children of the wood. Later on in the season, the edge of the Punch Bowl, that great hollow beyond the oak coppice, whose rim just shows against the sky line, the hollow where the red deer are so fond of lying, will be strewn with broken eggs of black game and pheasant, the spoil of raids in the heather and the covert. And here, too, scattered under the trees, are broken ringdoves' eggs, bearing plainly the marks of those black-coated, merciless marauders. From that corner too, out of the jungle of broom, and hazel, and wild-briar, comes at intervals the crow of a pheasant—a strident and far-reaching cry, different altogether from all other woodland voices. And in every tree along the slope willow warblers are crooning, over and over, their dainty snatches of sweet, low-toned song. It is a sleepy tune; a leisurely cadence of soft sounds, suggestive of sunshine and the summer, of

It is a cold, grey world that lies waiting for the dawn—a misty sky, in which one pale planet glimmers; a hazy sea, whose fretted levels shine faintly in the moonlight; shadowy hills, along whose winding line, here darkened with clustering woodlands, and there whitened by still slumbering hamlets, a grey mist hangs. It hangs, too, like a vast canopy, over the wide plain, whose sunburnt meadows seem to melt away into an infinite distance; and along the wandering river whose brown flood loiters idly to the sea.

A silent world, for the most part. Even the voice of the river, that but now was chafing loud against the shingle bar piled high along the shore, is failing in the swift inrush of the tide. It is a slow moving and taciturn stream that, as it wound along the level fringes of the hills, long since forgot the sunshine and the laughter and the crystal clearness of its youth, when, under banks that were hung with fern and meadow-sweet, it sang over the brown pebbles of its bed, round

But the tide, that is hushing the hoarse song of the river, swells louder every moment the troubled roar of the sea, whose grey waves are plunging in over the rattling shingle and the shining sand.

And as the light of dawning strengthens over the low grey hills to the eastward, other sounds break in upon the stillness. Far off across the moor a curlew calls. A heron who all night long, it may be, has been keeping his lone vigil in the marshes, and who is now flying leisurely home-ward to the hills, lets fall a muttered croak in passing—midnight revellers both. But the white gulls that rise and fall and toy like butterflies above the broadening stream calling to each other with discordant voices, are children of the sunshine.

Of the sunshine, too, is the music of a lark, who, high up in the grey mist, brooding like a fate over the brown and thirsty meadows, seems to hover at the very gates of dawn. Yet there is a sound of the sea even on his silvery tongue. Among the sweet notes of his familiar "babble of green fields," he brings in at times the cry of the curlew and the whistle of the plover.

A breath of the sea there is, too, in the chatter of the starling on the roof above. The croak of the heron and the call of the whimbrel are common speech with him. And now he even imitates the creak of the cordage on the coasting smack swinging in the stream yonder, where two men are busy setting the old brown sails.

From the cliffs that break the round swell of the hill a line of daws are streaming, eager, clamorous, on the wing for their hunting ground upon the moor. One troop has wheeled aside to alight among the boughs of a cherry-tree in a little walled-in space of garden at some distance from the house. The farmer, who has just appeared, with his milking-pail upon his shoulder, and who looks up to nod a friendly greeting, pauses a moment in the doorway to watch the marauders at their work, while the old sheep-dog waits wondering at his side.

Suddenly, far out on the moor, beyond the cattle that stand motionless, expectant, all looking this way, a tall figure looms out of the mist, and across the fields comes a strange cry:

The old dog hears, and bounds forward to his work. But the sleek and sober herd, never turning their heads to look behind them, move slowly, as by common impulse, converging fanwise to the gate. Men in white smocks, and with shining pails upon their backs, are striding through the meadows towards the farm. And all the while the milking call sounds at intervals across the fields:—

But along the side of the green headland that, beyond the old farm-buildings stretches a mile or more into the sea, silence still reigns, save for the sound of the waves, for the plaintive cry of a curlew or the clamour of a troop of gulls.

When a gleam of sunshine breaks the grey veil of cloud, changing the sombre hues of the mud flats to warm tones of brown and purple, turning to gold the broad beach and the ragged sand-hills, birds, unseen before, start swiftly into view. Here a tall curlew stalks solemnly along, erect and watchful. There an inky crow is picking dainty morsels from the ooze. And here a party of trim black-headed gulls have collected round some treasure trove left by the last tide. A troop of sandpipers sweeps along, now flashing in a hundred points of silver in the sunlight; now, as they wheel, all lost again in the brown hues of their haunts. As far as the eye can reach are scattered gulls, shieldrakes, oyster-catchers, rock-doves even, foraging by the edge of the water, falling back before the rising tide.

But sounds of life are faint, even now. Among the boulders pipits flit at times with feeble cries. And a brood of young kestrels lately fledged, sail and soar along the cliff farther on, and scream as if in defiance of the wind, against which their keen wings are beating. The rocky brows that overhang the shore are thick with grasses and sweet bedstraw, with flags and mullein, and tall evening primrose. In the crannies campion and sea-pink are rooted. Here a yellow poppy trembles in the wind, and there a great cluster of samphire fills a rocky cleft. There are tufts of it quite low down, but it is a plant that always grows above high-water mark, and many a shipwrecked sailor, thrown ashore among the rocks, has taken heart again when, in the darkness, his despairing grasp has tightened on those strangely smelling leaves. It is St. Peter's plant—Saint Pierre, sampier, samphire.

Now the shrill screaming of the kestrels rises louder still, the fierce cry of the old birds mingling with the plaintive clamour of their brood. Now one of them, sweeping round the headland, poises a moment in the air, his wings motionless, his tail spread wide, his figure dark upon the western sky. Slowly stooping, he alights on the crown of a rocky pinnacle, a crag that stands out from the cliff like the tower of some old stronghold; and, with feet spread wide, clutching with his strong claws the rifted rock, his head lowered to the wind, stands a splendid figure, as still as if he were the living rock. Many a keen-eyed falcon has looked out over the sea from that high watch tower, round whose base wander grey arms of ivy, gnarled and wrinkled, centuries old.

Nor do hawks alone find sanctuary here. So quiet is this lonely shore, so complete its solitude, that among these cliffs even the raven and the peregrine are safe.

In the shelter of a long line of sand-hills that centuries have heaped over the old sea-wall, there stands a solitary cottage. Its brown eaves just peer over the dyke of sand. No window looks to seaward through its massy wall. It is close above high-water mark. Often, on wild nights of winter,

Close by it runs a belt of shingle, and, beyond, there stretches away to the brown sea a wide sweep of sand, on whose wet surface the heron and the curlew leave their traces, where whole armies of sandpipers weave a maze of tiny footprints. To them this barren shore is a land of plenty. This open beach is to them the very safest of sanctuaries. No wildfowler can get within range of them unobserved. Their only foes are the herring-gull—the pirate of the sea—or the keen-eyed falcon that has his hold in yonder cliff.

Except at times of very high tides—even then only when accompanied by stormy weather—the sea never quite reaches to the sand-hills; but in summer especially, a mirage is occasionally seen on this wide beach,—a phantom sea, in whose smooth surface are reflected the jagged line of sand-hills, the church of the distant village, and the few houses scattered at far intervals along the coast.

It is a fruitful plain, whose level meadows stretch away from the old farm, fading only on the far horizon. So low it lies that, were it not for yonder mounds of sand, whose jagged fringes line the coast for miles, the high October tides would often, when a strong wind is blowing, find their way among the hamlets far inland. Many a time has the old wall given way; never, perhaps, with quite such dire results as in the great flood of 1607, when the salt water was twelve feet deep in villages five miles from the sea. Thirty hamlets were overwhelmed. Scores of unhappy villagers perished. So swift was the rush of the water that there was no chance of escape, and for many—in the words of a black-letter chap-book of the time, "their last refuge was patiently to die. Cattle were drowned in droves. Rabbits being driven out of their burroughes by the tyde, were seene to sit for safety on the backs of sheepe, as they swom up and downe, and at last were drowned with them…. Deade bodies floate hourely above water, and are continually taken uppe. It cannot yet be knowne howe manye have fell in this Tempest of God's fearful judgement."

Life here was not always quiet. The green slopes of the hill above are scarred all along with old earthworks, so defaced by plough and spade, so trampled down by men and cattle, so worn by the storms of untold centuries, that the eye can hardly trace their outlines in the smooth short sward. Not even a tradition survives of the lost inhabitants whose rude pottery and flint arrow-heads the rabbits bring up among the red earth of their burrows. Compared with this old hill fortress, the earthworks round the tower of the church yonder, the square lines of a Roman camp, the last fort on the well-guarded road down which was brought metal from the mines among the hills, are works of yesterday.

Again and again this coast was wasted by the Danes, who plundered not the hamlets by the shore alone, but villages twenty miles from the sea. Victory was not always with the invaders. Athelney is not far distant. Ethandune was on that low line of hills to the southward. And in the very year of that crowning victory, a few miles farther down, "the brother of Hingwar and Halfdene came with twenty-three ships … and he was there slain, and with him eight hundred and forty of his army, and there was taken the war-flag which they called the Raven." By the river that loiters seaward under the blue hills across the bay, whose broad mouth shines like silver in the sun, still stands the green mound of Hubbalowe, which the vikings piled over the ashes of the dead sea-rover. On every hill-top in the West Country