Excerpt from Hampshire Days

Sometimes about noon the Clouds grow thin in that part of the sky, low down, where the Sun is, and a pale gleam of sunlight filters through; even a patch of lucid blue Sky sometimes becomes visible for a while: but the light soon fades; after mid-day the dimness increases, and before long one begins to think that evening has come. Withal it is singularly mild. One could almost imagine in this season of mist and wet and soft airs in late November that this is a land where days grew short and dark indeed, but where winter comes not, and the sensation of cold is nu known. It is pleasant to be out Of doors in such weather, to stand in the coloured woods listening to that autumn sound of tits and other little birds wan dering through the high trees in straggling parties, talking and calling -to one another in their small Sharp voices. Or to walk by the Boldre, or, as some call it, the Lymington, a slow, tame stream in summer, invisible till you are close to it; but now, in flood, the trees that grow on its banks and hid it in summer are seen standing deep in a broad, rushing, noisy river.

The woodpecker's laugh has the same careless happy sound as in summer: it is scarcely light in the morning before the small wren pours out his sharp bright lyric outside my window; it is time, he tells me, to light my candle and get up. The starlings are about the house all day long, vocal even in the rain, carrying on their perpetual starling conversation - talk and song and recitative; a sort of bird-yiddish, with fluty fragments of melody stolen from the black bird, and whistle and click and the music Of the triangle thrown in to give variety. SO mild is it that in the blackness Of night I sometimes wander into the forest paths and by furzy heaths and hedges to listen for the delicate shrill music of our late chirper in the thickets.

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