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A day follows of rain and wind, and it is the robin that is most heard among the dripping thorns, the robin and his autumnal voice. But the sky clears for sunset and the blackbird’s hour, and, as twilight ends, only the rear of the disappearing procession of day cloud is visible on the western horizon, while the procession of night has but sent up two or three dark forerunners. The sky is of palest blue, and Jupiter and Sirius are bright over the sea, Venus over the land and Mercury just over the far oaks. The sea is very dark except at the horizon which is pale with the dissolving remnant of sunset gold in it; but two ranks of breakers throw up a waving vapour of fairy foam against the dark waves behind.

Again there are roaring wet mornings and sunlit mornings, but in them all the pewits wheel over the marsh and their wild cries mingle with the sweet whimper of dunlins, the songs of larks, the glitter of the dykes, the wall of rain. All day the sky over heathery moorland is like a reduplication of the moorland, except that at the horizon the sky clears at intervals and fleets of pure white cloud sail over the dark ploughland and green pines; and the gentle sea is white only where the waves break on the sand like a line of children in white frocks advancing with wavers in the game of “Here we come gathering nuts and may.” Or the west is angry, thick and grey, the snow is horizontal and fierce, and yet the south has a bay of blue sky and in it a vast sunlit precipice of white cloud, and the missel thrushes roll out their songs again and again at the edges of many woods. Or a sun appears that brings out the songs of thrush and chaffinch and lark, and leaves a chequer of snow on pine and ploughland and on the mole hills of the meadows. Again the sun disappears and the swift heavy hail rebounds on the grass with a dancing as of sand-hoppers, and there is no other sound except a sudden hedgesparrow’s song to break in upon the beating of the pellets on hard ivy and holly and tender grass. In the frosty evening the first moth comes to the lamp.