MANY celandines are now showing a yellow cup to the sun; a dearly loved flower the celandine, braving the frosts and the loneliness, with only the windrifted leaves of a dead year for company. But its courage makes it beautiful—one of the first of the players in the country orchestra of scent and colour and loveliness to take its seat in the amphitheatre of spring.
On the railway embankment the coltsfoot flowers are rising. How can one be sad when Proserpine will shortly float over the meadows and the woodlands? Now we must lift our hearts above earthly unhappiness, and, with Nature, be joyous.
What matter the fallings of so many leaves in the past when to-day the wild and happy humble bees are passing in the sunshine, dusty from the pollen of the willow-palm? That the symphony of summer must die in autumn’s cadences is inevitable, but now the grass is rising on the crumbled brick rim of the deserted limekiln, and on the pile of chalk a wagtail calls to his mate.
There are the sweet notes of the finches who are fluttering round the weeds of the wasteland, and the distant caw of rooks. A great cloud rushes in the sky; the light is checked. It is cold once more. But every day the sun swings in a higher curve; over the sea the call has gone, and even now the migrants in Africa and Egypt are restless.
Very soon the chiffchaff will pipe his monotonous tune by the lake, and the wheatears will be back on the sward of the downlands. A few weeks and the cuckoo will call in the forest and the swallows glide around the barns and the ricks—“all the living staircase of the spring, step by step, upwards to the great gallery of the summer.”