The Microscopic Eye Thus on my return I have been
sensibly sharpened in my observation of the tiny events that are always crowding the local acres. In this mood of self-welcome home I have watched the flight of the green woodpecker (much in evidence now), and noted how this exotically dressed fellow, with his parrot-like hues, progresses through the air with a dipping motion, so that a graph of his flight would be a series of shallow waves, each filling about a second of time. He seems to hurry at the trough of each wave, fearful of the loss of energy. This gives his flight a some- what baffled and despairing character, as though he is struggling against destiny rather than the mere indifference of the air.
I have noted, too, how one morning of warm sunshine acts with a laboratory preciseness on the sodden winter wheat, changing it from yellow to a vivid green within a few hours. The speed of plant life is often ignored by us warm-blooded mortals. The changes and gestures of opening buds, especially flower-buds ; the response of thirsty stems and leaves to a gift of rain ; the panic under frost—these are the more obvious reactions in the vegetable world which may be seen as definable motions.
I have seen, too, a bank of white violets, finding them with the eye after a whiff of delicious perfume had already promised me the feast. The first milkmaids, or cuckoo-flowers, with their petals of old and often-washed linen, are now opening in damp ground and along the still- flooded ditches ; and since I last mentioned the lesser celandine, this child of Wordsworth has multiplied and taken the stage. I have observed here before bow every year nature takes a fancy for favouring one or other of the wild-flowers in this way.
My eye, through this repolished lens of affection, has also been scanning the night-sky, that accessory garden for the countryman ; but a garden of cold blossoms whose petals could we approach them would terrify us. This week Venus is proud in the sunset sky, and with a pair of binoculars one may find Mercury not far away from her.
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