Whereupon one of the boys produced a second robin from his jacket pocket, and when I took it from him the other boy pulled out two more robins from his pockets and handed them to me.
"Now look here," I began in my severest tone, and proceeded to give them a lecture on their unkindness in taking young robins, and did not forget to quote Blake on the subject, for of all birds the robin was the least fitted to be made a prisoner, and so on until I finished.
But the boys showed no sense of guilt or repentance and were no more disturbed at my words than the robins were at being handled, and at length one of them said that they had no intention of taking the birds home.
"What, then, did you have them in your pockets for?" I demanded.
He replied that they put them in their pockets just to keep them out of my sight. They were playing with the birds when I found them, and they had known the nest since it was made, and every day after the young had come out one or both of them had paid them a visit, and they always brought a small supply of caterpillars to feed the robins with.
It was quite true, the tameness of the four young robins sitting on our hands and knees was a proof of it. From time to time while we sat there with them the old birds flew down near us just to take a look round as it seemed and then flew off again, but by and by when we put them back on their little platform the parents came and fed them close to our side.
_Late flowers at Land's End--Sweet-scented colt's-foot--Its luxuriance and beauty--A pretty and singular girl--A gardener on the colt's-foot--Colt's-foot in Madron churchyard--A vegetable rat--Billy and his charlock bouquet--"Farmer's Glory"--Early blue flowers--A matter-of-fact girl--Vernal squill--Beauty and habits--A blue band by the sea--The glory of flowers--Secret of the charm of flowers--Expression of the blue flower._
|BIRDS are perhaps too much to me; at all events, I find that an entire chapter has been written on the coming of spring without a word in it about flowers; it was nearly all taken up with the feathered people. Yet one cannot think of spring without those little touches of moist brilliant colour shining gem-like among the old dead brown leaves and herbage and in all green places. Even here, in a district comparatively flowerless for many months, as I have said, there are flowers to be seen if looked for pretty well all the year round. Just now, before sitting down to write this chapter at the windy bleak Land's End, a very few days before Christmas, I went out in the late afternoon, and seeing herb-robert looking very pretty in the shelter of a stone hedge, then some other small flower, and then others, I began idly plucking a spray or two of each, and after crossing three or four fields and home again I found that my little bouquet contained blooms of seventeen different species. If I had gone on a few fields further the number might have been twenty-five or thirty. These little summer and autumn flowers that bloom on till frosts come are all of very common kinds, except, perhaps, the yellow pansy which is confined to the western extremity of the county. There are other flowers proper to the early spring which were a delight to me and which will ever be associated in my mind with the thoughts of Cornwall.