Page:ONCE A WEEK JUL TO DEC 1860.pdf/576

 568 exhilarated by the exercise, but without having seen anything beyond the width of the road, or the height of their own heads. While we are at breakfast, we see the fog becoming whiter and thinner, till it breaks into portions, and begins to open and rise. Here we see the profile of a tree, and there a whole shrub with some marigold or lingering dahlia beside it. Then a pencil of yellow rays makes an emerald path across the grass, and lights up the ivy on the toolhouse wall. Then the clearance goes on rapidly, and the last wreaths are wafted away, to shine like white fleeces in the pale blue sky.

On such days we make sure of our ramble early. We know the value of the first half of the month by our almost invariable experience of the change in the middle of it. We reckon on nothing in the way of weather after Martinmas (the 11th), and we seldom pass the 15th without losing the sunshine.

As for what we see, it is a sort of ripening and extension of what we saw in October. The thrushes and greenfinches are busy among the hips and haws; but the birds’ nests are becoming visible in every hedge, as the winds carry off the last yellow leaves. There, where the little blue or white or brown eggs were so snugly hidden in the foliage, and the henbird sat so close and still, the nest is now exposed to all eyes—perhaps hanging in shreds from the thorns, and deserted. Now and then, if there is a prodigious bustle among the birds at their meal, or an agitation among the fieldfares that have settled down on the fallow beyond, we know what to look for; and there, wheeling or swooping, is the hawk—hungry, and bold accordingly. The small creatures are almost all gone into winter quarters. The fieldmice are snug at home in their larders. We have too much reason to know where the rats are. The squirrels are less and less seen, except in the warmest noon hour. The frogs have gone to bed for the winter in the mud at the bottom of the ponds, and the badger in some hole in the bank, and the hedgehog in some dry hollow.