All this morning we have had pitiless rain driven before a south-easterly-wind, and at present the weather shows no sign of improving. Wild things, however, are often tamer on a rough day than on a fine one, having, no doubt, learned by experience that human creatures stay at home or “keep themselves to themselves,” as the village says. At this moment a pair of partridges, so large that they must, I think, be of the French variety, are cropping grass blades as sedately as fowls under a beech hedge not twenty yards from my window, and earlier in the day a fieldfare (fieldfares generally avoid a garden) accepted protection from two missel-thrushes and came very much nearer. It was a pleasure to be able to appreciate his beautiful colouring with the naked eye, relieved as it was against the vivid green of the grass; in particular the back, so much ruddier than that of our own thrush, and the peculiar grey-blue along the flanks. Indeed, he seemed altogether a very richly painted beast this morning, almost up to the standard of a coloured illustration in a bird book! He and the missel-thrushes seemed to have chosen good ground. One or other of them was always engaged in a tug-of-war whenever I glanced their way, and the size of some of the worms and the efforts required for getting them made one feel quite “uncomfortable.”
