dead throughout this landscape of manifest life. Where are they--all the
dying, all the dead, of the populous woods? Where do they hide their
little last hours, where are they buried? Where is the violence
concealed? Under what gay custom and decent habit? You may see, it is
true, an earth-worm in a robin's beak, and may hear a thrush breaking a
snail's shell; but these little things are, as it were, passed by with a
kind of twinkle for apology, as by a well-bred man who does openly some
little solecism which is too slight for direct mention, and which a
meaner man might hide or avoid. Unless you are very modern indeed, you
twinkle back at the bird.

But otherwise there is nothing visible of the havoc and the prey and
plunder. It is certain that much of the visible life passes violently
into other forms, flashes without pause into another flame; but not all.
Amid all the killing there must be much dying. There are, for instance,
few birds of prey left in our more accessible counties now, and many
thousands of birds must die uncaught by a hawk and unpierced. But if
their killing is done so modestly, so then is their dying also. Short
lives have all these wild things, but there are innumerable flocks of
them always alive; they must die, then, in innumerable flocks. And yet
they keep the millions of the dead out of sight.

Now and then, indeed, they may be betrayed. It happened in a cold
winter. The late frosts were so sudden, and the famine was so complete,
that the birds were taken unawares. The sky and the earth conspired that
February to make known all the secrets; everything was published. Death
was manifest. Editors, when a great man dies, are not more resolute than
was the frost of '95.

The birds were obliged to die in public. They were surprised and forced