COUNTRY LIFE
ONE of the compensations, if they be needed, of living intensely within a small area of activities and connections is the enlargement of our powers of perceiving and interpreting little things and events. Goldsmith remarked on this in the opening pages of The Vicar of Wakefield ; and his remark is as true today as it was then. While drinking my coffee this morning, and gazing somewhat disconsolately out of the window at the sodden landscape, with the next storm already throwing its leaden ingots across the western sky, I was suddenly enchanted by the spectacle of a male bullfinch, who joined thc sparrows and blue-tits engaged in pecking the flower-buds out of an ornamental plum tree on the terrace. What a foreign gentleman he is, got up to the nines in his fiery coat and black helmet, a kind of Oriental knight, a true paynim. The lesser thieves were obviously afraid of him, for they withdrew to a respectable distance and left him the run of several boughs. He took advantage of this freedom to perform a few gymnastics, swinging head-downward and preening his feathers while topsy- turvy ; then stropping his beak (an ominous-looking battle-axe) on the wet bark of the branch above him.
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