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12 them about the equinox; of course they have been getting ready for weeks, but some at least of them stick to their habits of the winter, for there are flights of them hurrying westward to their roosting-place beyond the hills, where the sun will soon be setting. Birds that can still do this have hardly yet begun to nest.

It is really in the grass and the plough-land that I see most change since my last visit. This meadow slopes before me to the west, and the sun, now close on the hill-top, fills all the grass with light, making the old brown tufts stand out distinctly amid the fresh growth of to-day. Those old tufts remind me of snow, and of Keats's hare that "limped trembling through the frozen grass"; these warm, green patches, of the boundless growth of buttercups that is to come, of exhausted cows on a hot June day, of all that wealth of summer rain that no farmer seems to be able to foretell and anticipate. Thought might wander on at will, but my eye catches a new token of business (in the real sense of that sorrily-handled word) in the abundant mole-heaps that crowd the slope a little farther on.

These indefatigable little animals have been at work since January, when their favourite hunting-grounds suddenly showed an eruption of little brown hillocks; and now you see here and there among these a small stick thrust into the ground, which