Page:Bird Life Throughout the Year (Salter, 1913).djvu/319

Rh from the tree-tops, show as moving specks of bluish-grey against the dark, coppery background of the beeches. The trees are well-grown, shapely specimens, recalling the eulogy of White on this "the most lovely of all forest trees, whether we consider its smooth rind or bark, its glossy foliage, or graceful pendulous boughs." Following a sort of track along the top of the hill, and down its further side, the corner of Selborne Hanger appears, and a few of the houses of the village, some half a mile away. At the entrance to the village a spring gushes out, which it is easy to recognise as the old Well-head, "that fine perennial fount, little influenced by drought or wet seasons," now metamorphosed into a handsome brass fountain with a trough at which the villagers may fill their pails. The single street, of which the hamlet consists, straggles for perhaps half a mile north-west from this point, the church and more interesting part, so far as we are concerned, lying at its further extremity. The cottages are with scarcely an exception of a very humble order, and the sights and sounds are those of a thousand other English villages—the inn, with its swinging sign and the waggoner's team halting in the road before it, the fold-yard where the cattle stand knee-deep in straw, the smithy under whose porch, curiously supported by three pollard lime-trees, the sparks are flying, the village shop, which seems to sell everything from biscuits to boot-laces, and lastly the modest school-house,