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They have been cronies ever since, and I notice that Mr. Salford, who naturally does most of the talking, keeps tight grip of the other old man's coat. The two last places before you come to our gate are the Dog's Cemetery and the chaffinch's nest, but we pretend not to know what the Dog's Cemetery is, as Porthos is always with us. The nest is very sad.
I used to watch the birds building through that glass, and could almost see the eggs in one little mossy cup of a chaffinch's nest; but I could not quite. I did see the tips of the young birds' beaks, though, when they were hatched and the old ones came to feed them.
Then, one day, as they were sitting before the house under a very high tree, the father said, 'I should like to try what each of you can do in this way. So he looked up, and said to the second son, 'At the top of this tree there is a chaffinch's nest; tell me how many eggs there are in it. The star-gazer took his glass, looked up, and said, 'Five. 'Now, said the father to the eldest son, 'take away the eggs without letting the bird that is sitting upon them and hatching them know anything of what you are doing. So the cunning thief climbed up the tree, and brought away to his father the five eggs from under the bird; and it never saw or felt what he was doing, but kept sitting on at its ease.
This was one of my most eventful days in London, and I shall long remember it. But now I must tell you of that evening shall I confess it? the happiest evening of my life when Drinkwater and I went to Lady Chaffinch's ball. My Aunt was too indisposed to accompany us; she therefore called her son, and told him to take great care of me, as much as if I were his own sister.
My chaffinch's nest, my swallows, twittering but a few months ago around the kraal of the Hottentot, or chasing flies around the six solitary pillars of Baalbec, with their nests in the corners of my bed-room windows, my long-armed fruit-trees flowering against my sunny wall, are not mighty pleasures, but then they are my own, and I have not to go in search of them.
II. Sin-Engendered Sin It is a lovely winter's day, and Cyril, Lilian, and Everard are walking through the woods at the back of Lee's cottage. Cyril puts something into a hollow tree, and intimates a chaffinch's call. Another bird replies. Cyril walks on to Oldport, leaving Everard and Lilian, between whom there follows a warm love scene and betrothal. During this episode Mrs.
I remember it well, because of two things. First, that Jem got five of the largest hips we had ever seen off a leafless dog-rose branch which stuck far out of the hedge, and picked the little green coronets off, so that they were smooth and glossy, and egg-shaped, and crimson on one side and yellow on the other; and then he got an empty chaffinch's nest close by and put the five hips into it, and took it home, and persuaded Alice our new parlourmaid that it was a robin redbreast's nest with eggs in it.
I held the letter loosely in my hands, and looked into vacancy, yet I saw the chaffinch's nest on the lichen-covered trunk of an old apple-tree opposite my window, and saw the mother-bird come fluttering in to feed her brood, and yet I did not see it, although it seemed to me afterwards as if I could have drawn every fibre, every feather.
It had been very sparing also in its use of the Chaffinch's note, until one in the neighbourhood had begun to twink, twink, twink; then the Mocking-Bird took it up, and twinked away for fifty times together. Next morning the Linnet's note was much more frequent in request, and it also made more use of notes with which I was not acquainted.
Lee, Alma's stepmother, tells her husband that Alma is gone to meet her unknown lover in the wood at the signal of a chaffinch's call. Lee follows, and finds Alma there alone. He picks up a paper she had torn and dropped; it contains an assignation for that evening at dusk. Before luncheon Everard changes the grey suit he was wearing, and had stained in a muddy ditch.
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