tree on the five little mottled eggs in her nest. Or perhaps his
midsummer's music had reached its highest point, and was now in its
declension. And perhaps the fault was in me. The virtue that draws and
holds us does not hold us always, nor very long; it departs from all
things, and we wonder why. The loss is in ourselves, although we do not
know it. Nature, the chosen mistress of our heart, does not change
towards us, yet she is now, even to-day--

"Less full of purple colour and hid spice,"

and smiles and sparkles in vain to allure us, and when she touches us
with her warm, caressing touch, there is, compared with yesterday, only
a faint response.




V


Coming back from the waterside through the wood, after the hottest hours
of the day were over, the crooning of the turtle-doves would be heard
again on every side--that summer beech-wood lullaby that seemed never to
end. The other bird voices were of the willow-wren, the wood-wren, the
coal-tit, and the now somewhat tiresome chiffchaff; from the distance
would come the prolonged rich strain of the blackbird, and occasionally
the lyric of the chaffinch. The song of this bird gains greatly when
heard from a tall tree in the woodland silence; it has then a resonance
and wildness which it appears to lack in the garden and orchard. In the
village I had been glad to find that the chaffinch was not too common,