opens its lattices out into the greenness. And mine is like a little
jewelled door, for the sun is shining from behind the chimneys and
lighting the tiny diamond panes with amber flashes.

A faint delicate haze lies over the meadow, and rising out of it, and
soaring toward the blue is the lark, flinging out that matchless matin
song, so rich, so thrilling, so lavish! As the blithe melody fades away,
I hear the plaintive ballad-fragments of the robin on a curtsying branch
near my window; and there is always the liquid pipe of the thrush, who
must quaff a fairy goblet of dew between his songs, I should think, so
fresh and eternally young is his note.

There is another beautiful song that I follow whenever I hear it,
straining my eyes to the treetops, yet never finding a bird that I can
identify as the singer. Can it be the--

"Ousel-cock so black of hue,
With orange-tawny bill"?

He is called the poet-laureate of the primrose time, but I don't know
whether he sings in midsummer, and I have not seen him hereabouts. I
must write and ask my dear Man of the North. The Man of the North, I
sometimes think, had a Fairy Grandmother who was a robin; and perhaps she
made a nest of fresh moss and put him in the green wood when he was a wee
bairnie, so that he waxed wise in bird-lore without knowing it. At all
events, describe to him the cock of a head, the glance of an eye, the tip-
up of a tail, or the sheen of a feather, and he will name you the bird.
Near-sighted he is, too, the Man of the North, but that is only for
people.