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
to do thus. They became like Shelley in the monument which the art and
imagination of England combined to raise to his memory at Oxford.

Frost was surely at work in both cases, and in both it wrought wrong.
There is a similarity of unreason in betraying the death of a bird and in
exhibiting the death of Shelley. The death of a soldier--_passe
encore_. But the death of Shelley was not his goal. And the death of
the birds is so little characteristic of them that, as has just been
said, no one in the world is aware of their dying, except only in the