Cuckoo pints, or, as they are called of the wood or the timber trees they in some districts, lords and ladies, the have selected ring again. It is a diffipoisonous arums of the hedgerows, cult matter to find out the exact tree show now under the hollow banks. they are at work on when they are These cuckoo pints and the stormcock fairly at their carpentering, for the are two features which when life stirs birds take turn and turn about at the are noticed by all; the green sheath of tunnelling business, and when one is at the one and the loud, bold song of the work the other is on the watch, lookother attract ear and eye quickly. The ing down on you as you creep through mistle thrush is the earliest member of the under stuff. As a rule some lucky his family whose song welcomes the accident enables you to determine on turn of the year. His relatives, the the exact spot; to your great astonishsong thrush and the blackbird, are early ment you find that you had been nesters, frequently having eggs laid searching in quite the wrong direction. before those other thrushes, the red- The last tunnel that I examined had wing and the field-fare, have made up young in it; the oak in which it was their minds to leave us; but they can stood out by itself on the sward. hardly be said to sing yet. Now and then they do make a start, but not before the furrows reek with the warm April showers will they be in full song.ling over the trunks and limbs of the The first to rejoice in the new life is that undaunted woodland singer, the stormcock; and his song is a welcome one, fitting in with the rush of gales, and the tossing of tree branches, when all life is stirring.

The green woodpecker and his mate are busy now, prospecting round; for the grubs, that have burrowed deep down in their tunnels, now draw up as near as they can to the bark, warmth being necessary for their perfect development. It is wonderful what a wealth of insect life old trees hold.

It takes these woodpeckers some time to fix on a site for a nest, if the hole made in the tree by the bill of the birds can be called one. If we examine the old nesting tunnel and the new one, in the same tree, we find circular holes, just large enough for the body of the bird, gouged out under a projecting limb. When the old nest gets foul, they set to work to make a fresh one. This matter is not settled in a hurry; for weeks the pair will look round in a general way, playing antics with each other, making the wood or copse ring with their yikeing laughs. As the ordinary woodland songsters have not yet tried their voices beyond half-hearted twiddles and pipings, the green woodpeckers have it pretty much to themselves, and they make the part

That full twit, twit, twit! like the lower notes of a fife, comes from the nimble nuthatch that is busily travel

nearest trees. This rich full twit! must be heard to be fully appreciated, for like the laugh of the green woodpecker it is not to be described by the pen. On the top twigs just swaying to and fro in the soft air, are the greenfinches, calling now as they will call at times in the heat of summer, Breeze, breeze-e-e, Breeze!

As the time follows on, more decided evidence is daily given that the heart of mighty nature is throbbing with the fulness which shall soon gladden all her children; the music of the winds, soft winds, that wave and bend without breaking, can be heard on the wide, open commons of the uplands.

Linnets gather and twitter to each other; the cock birds are very handsome now, for they are in full nesting, or we should have said, in full breeding plumage. One near us perched on the tips of some golden furze bloom, has a breast like a rose; he is no longer the "grey lintie," he is now the rosebreasted linnet of the commoners' children.

"No rose without a thorn," says the proverb, and as the little fellow is contentedly singing whilst he eyes the little flick of wool the sheep have left on the thorns as they passed, with which his mate will line her nest, a bird not larger than a ring ouzel shoots

up the rough track, about a foot from owl hump his back up, flutter his weak the ground; it rises like a flash, and wings, and turn his head from side to the linnet is captured by a male spar-side, for he could hear the call of his row-hawk. If the hawk had shown parents, but could not see me. itself above, all the birds would have dropped in the bushes. The hawk knew this and made his capture in the way described.

Pheasants crow and partridges call over ridge and furrow, and the hares course about in merry fashion; but as the fox and his vixen have a family to provide for, some of their frolics may be stopped prematurely.

same places, but these are gone now. Daisies and the golden buttercups now spangle the meadows.

"My brother what's just come home from foreign parts, said as how he felt as if he could bust out cryin' for joy The daffy-down-dillies have been when he leant on the gate o' our med-gathered in the moist woodland meadder, an' heard the blackbirds sing in ows by the children, to their hearty the old elms at the bottom on it. The content; and nice bunches of snowbirds is most hansom', an' cur'ous, drops had been gathered from the where he's bin, he says, and some on 'em sings. But he said not one on 'em could iver make him feel like that couple o' cock blackbirds a-singin' in our old elms." So spake a young friend of mine as we stood by the cottage gate together. For the time has come, noticed by ancient lovers of the woods and all that pertains to woodland lore, when the merle and the mavis are singing.

Flitting and piping, first on one side of the hedgerows, then on the other, are the bullfinches, making for the gardens.

"One swallow does not make a summer," says the old adage; the first originator of that saying must, I think, have been a little cantankerous; but the swallow, whenever he is seen, surely tells that brighter days are in store for us.

So far as the cuckoo is concerned, he has of late years been a little unfortunate. Snowstorms do not suit his constitution; for all that he pulls through. Very curious notions exist about this bird in some localities.

"Now look here, I don't care what you says, if you jabbered on fur a week. Cuckoos turn into hawks. An' I can tell ye summat else as will make yer open yer eyes a bit, -swallers in the winter goes under the mud like eels. I'd sooner believe my father's old book what tells ye about the swaller stone an' the swaller herb than I would what you says on it. Why, that ere book was writ afore my grandfather's time. It come down to us in the fambley. An' I've heerd my old granny say as all critters an' herbs - an' us as well- was all under the power o' the planets."

On a bit of greensward by the edge of a woodland road a doe rabbit has brought her litter of young ones from her stop in a ploughed field the other side of the hedge. As they sit crouched round about her, the old doe looks as if she was sitting among some scattered potatoes; for only the arch of the youngsters' backs show, and they are close to the hedge, ready for a bolt if required. And well they may be, for the dusk of a spring evening is drawing on, and before we cleared the last timbered copse we heard very cat-like mewings from some young owls of the long-eared kind. In fact, for half an hour I had been amusing myself by getting in one of the hollow ash pol- Jack was only proving in his own lards and calling one of the "branch-rough way what our forefathers in ers" to me. He was not able to fly, their own limited and peculiar fashion but he could flutter and jump from had noticed of the resting time of nabough to bough. It was a most ludi- ture, and the time when life stirs. crous performance to see the young

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From The London Quarterly Review.

OLD NEW ENGLAND.1

THERE is no greater refreshment for a mind wearied with the noise and worry of the present than to be carried out from itself into the far-away past, and to be enabled to realize the daily life, participate in the joys and sorrows, and revel in the quaint and strange humors of remote ancestors, with a zest proportioned to their dissimilarity to the men and women, the customs and fashions of to-day. Even the woes, sad yet comical, of a New England baby in the fresh and hardy days of the Puritan colonists, may be contemplated with a healthy tendency

to thankfulness that life in these later

times is not so bad after all, especially for the neophytes.

of the period, a handbook wholly free from dulness and dryness.

When the Puritan baby opened his eyes in the raw New England atmosphere, he began his hard struggle for would be warm enough. But if it were life. If it were summer, he probably winter, his transition from the hot fireside, where his tiny face was scorched tance of a few feet, would bring him by the roaring wood fire, to the diswithin range of a temperature that. would grievously discomfort him, and possibly benumb and stupefy him by its severity.

little colonist.

in a strange world were over, a rude When but a few days of his sojourn shock was in reserve for the tender On the very next Sunday after his birth he was carried To such a healing transmigration chilly meeting-house, there to be bapthrough the frosty air to the damp and Mrs. Earle's dainty little book grace- tized. And he might consider himself fully lends itself. Indeed, she herself strikes the keynote of this grateful mood in the artless yet artful motto on her title-page: "Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank him not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages."

But the book by no means confines itself to a detail of the sufferings of King Baby in those early New England days. Beyond the charming chapter on "Child Life," three hundred and fifty pages are devoted to no less, if not still more, interesting topics, ranging from " Courtship and Marriage" and

touched with the freezing fluid, and
fortunate if he was simply sprinkled or
not bodily immersed in it. Often the
ice had to be broken in the christening
bowl;
and of one hard parson it is
immersion till his own child nearly lost
recorded that he persisted in infant
its life thereby. It certainly is to his
credit that after that experiment he
broke away from his hazardous rou-
tine. A living heart evidently was
hidden under his iron exterior.

In the diary of Judge Samuel Sewall a New England Pepys or Evelyn, of has made judicious use we find proof whose journalistic gossip Mrs. Earle that rough, bitter weather was not "Domestic Service" down to "Raiallowed to defer the performance of ment and Vesture," "Doctors and Patients," and the unavoidable sequence children was baptized when four days One of his own this initiatory rite. and close, "Funeral and Burial Cus-old. "Day was louring after the storm toms." If the reader is contemplating but not freezing. Child shrank at the a grand historical romance, the accessories filled in with the beautiful accuracy of Sir Walter Scott, the scene laid in New England in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, here is the very volume for him, an indispensable guide to most of the picturesque peculiarities

little fellow, on a blustering, windy water but Cry'd not." So with another Sabbath. "Small wonder," reflects our author, "that they quickly yielded up

for life so gloomily and so coldly betheir souls after the short struggle gun." The majority of Sewall's numer1 Customs and Fashions in Old New England. Cotton Mather's fifteen, only two surous children died in infancy; and of By Alice Morse Earle. London: David Nutt. 1893.

vived him.