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After her ride she avoided lunch, and walked out into the lanes. But about two o'clock, feeling very hungry, she went into a farmhouse, and asked for milk. There, in the kitchen, like young jackdaws in a row with their mouths a little open, were the three farm boys, seated on a bench gripped to the alcove of the great fire-way, munching bread and cheese.
Shrieking gulls and chattering jackdaws circled over us and below us, and dived and swooped; and a skerry of weedy, fallen chalk appeared, and gradually disappeared again, as the tide fell and rose. We talked and thought that afternoon on every aspect of our relations.
'By my head, said the Count, 'if I sleep under the stars I sleep at Autafort this night. But hear me charm this plotter. He called at the top of his voice, 'Ha, Bertran! Come you down, man. The surrounding hills echoed his cries, the jackdaws wheeled about the turrets; but presently came one and put his eye to the grille. Richard saw him. 'Is that you, then, Bertran? he shouted.
"I was much struck by the watchful jealousy with which the peregrines seemed to guard the particular cliff more than 500 feet from the sea on a lofty ledge of which their nest was situated, and which, indeed, they evidently considered their especial property; with the exception of a few jackdaws who bustled out of the crevices below, all the other birds which had now assembled on this part of the coast for the breeding season it being about the middle of May seemed to respect the territory of their warlike neighbours.
The white vapour covers the ground like a cloud, and the noise re-echoes against the old grey church, but the jackdaws do not even rise from the battlements. These engines and their corresponding tackle are the chief stock-in-trade of the village machinist.
Opposite, across the stream, a wide green sward stretches beside the towing-path, lit up with sunshine which touches the dandelions till they glow in the grass. From time to time a nightingale sings in a hawthorn unregarded, and in the elms of the park hard by a crowd of jackdaws chatter. But a little way round a curve the whole stream opens to the sunlight and becomes blue, reflecting the sky.
I could write a page, too, about the rooks or jackdaws that flit and clamor about the pinnacles, and dart in and out of the eyelet-holes, the piercings, whatever they are called, in the turrets and buttresses.
We have been so unfortunate as to lose two valuable members of the troupe, Zerbine and poor Matamore, rendering many of our best plays impossible for us, and at any rate we cannot give dramatic representations that would bring in much money here in the fields, where our audience would be mainly composed of crows, jackdaws, and magpies who could scarcely be expected to pay us very liberally for our entertainment.
The cenobitical life rapidly and necessarily superseded that of the solitary. In fact the monks were now no more solitaries than are the jackdaws in a cleft, or the bees in a hive, but unlike the jackdaws, they were under discipline, and unlike bees were without a sting. It was not mere love of an indolent life and a desire to escape from military service that swelled the numbers in the desert.
Beyond the sooty wall a birch flaunted its new tassels, and the jackdaws were circling about the steeple of the Guthrie Memorial Kirk. A blackbird whistled from a thorn-bush, and Mr. McCunn was inspired to follow its example. He began a tolerable version of "Roy's Wife of Aldivalloch." He felt singularly light-hearted, and the immediate cause was his safety razor.
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