Feb. 23—Out in the Chipao country on Suh-day morning everything was doing its best to look like Spring in spite of an overcast sky and chilly wind from the north-east: a few duck feeding in a long lagoon might well have been Widgeon when seen through the glasses, but attempts to get near them were rewarded only by a tail-end view zs the birds swept off on vivid wings: higher up a great Grey Heron flopped lazily over the sky, while a flock of birds looking black as crows in the distance soon identified themselves as Plovers by their rounded wings end the regular rhythm of their flight. The plaintive love-call of a Woodpecker repeated from a bamboo grove might well have been the cry of a Wryneck (which "we sometimes call a Cuckoo's Mate) but the calendar reminded me that it is early yet to think of this Spring migrant, even if the country is trying to deceive me into the belief that it is already April: for the crops ere springing forward with lightning rapidity, and the Horse Beans are staging their "one night only" performance of Jack-and-the-beanstalk, in the course of which they spring up as if by magic, unfolding weary looking leaves to display bunches of buds which soon will be sweet-smelling blooms. In fact, there is no doubt that, as the old gentlemen said in a recently formed comedy "Spring has sprung^ And the midst of this beautiful scene walked a
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.