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The greenfinches sank into the fallen swathe, the loose grass gave under their weight and let them bathe in flowers.
There had come a gleam of sunshine after two months of bitter north wind, and the insects took life immediately. Early in the morning the greenfinches were screaming at each other in the elm they were in such a hurry to get out their song, they screamed; the chaffinches were challenging, and the starlings fluttering their wings at the high window, and all this excitement at one gleam of sun.
Now it is curious that the sparrows and blackbirds, yellowhammers and greenfinches, that roost in the bushes, fly into the net and are easily captured, but the starlings thanks to their different ways in daylight always fly out at the top of the bush, and so escape. A black cannon ball lies in a garden, an ornament like a shell or a fossil, among blue lobelia and green ferns.
Divided between the two nets are the cages of the decoy-birds Linnets and Chaffinches, Greenfinches and Yellowhammers, Buntings and Ortolans sharp-eared creatures which, on perceiving the distant passage of a flock of their own kind, forthwith utter a short calling note. One of them, the Sambe, an irresistible tempter, hops about and flaps his wings in apparent freedom.
"Yes, indeed I will," said Bevis, "I will shoot my arrow and kill him quite dead in a minute." "But I am not sure you can hit him with your arrow; don't you remember that you could not hit the greenfinches nor the rook?" "Well then," said Bevis, "if you will wait till I am a man, papa will lend me his gun, and then I can certainly kill him."
Thrushes sang, and chaffinches, and, sweetest of all, if simplest in notes, the greenfinches talked and courted in the trees. Two cuckoos called in different directions, wood-pigeons raised their voices in Selworthy Wood, and rooks went over cawing in their deliberate way.
At that time the ivy leaves which flourish up to the very tops of the oaks are so smooth with enamelled surface, that high up, as the wind moves them, they reflect the sunlight and scintillate. Greenfinches in the elms never cease love-making; and love-making needs much soft talking. A nightingale in a bush sings so loud the hawthorn seems too small for the vigour of the song.
In a minute he opens them, shuts them again, half wheels round, and by-and-by just when he chooses, and not before floats away. The flowers open, and remain open for hours, to the sun. Hastelessness is the only word one can make up to describe it; there is much rest, but no haste. Each moment, as with the greenfinches, is so full of life that it seems so long and so sufficient in itself.
I caught glimpses of a ploughed field recently sown one spring from the window of a railway carriage, every little clod of which seemed alive with small birds, principally sparrows, chaffinches, and greenfinches. There must have been thousands in that field alone. In autumn the numbers are even greater, or rather more apparent.
The starlings, too, would gobble down the elder-berries, and sometimes the greenfinches used to go to see how the radish seeds were getting on, and taking tight hold of the thread-like shoots, pull them out of the ground, and leave them upon the top of the bed, fast asleep, for they never grew any more.
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