By every farm, cottage, and field, they passed invisible,
quartering the dark air. Their voyages of discovery stretched up on to
the moor as far as the wild stone man, whose origin their wisdom perhaps
knew. Round Audrey Noel's cottage they were as thick as thieves, for
they had just there two habitations in a long, old, holly-grown
wall, and almost seemed to be guarding the mistress of that thatched
dwelling--so numerous were their fluttering rushes, so tenderly
prolonged their soft sentinel callings. Now that the weather was really
warm, so that joy of life was in the voles, they found those succulent
creatures of an extraordinarily pleasant flavour, and on them each pair
was bringing up a family of exceptionally fine little owls, very solemn,
with big heads, bright large eyes, and wings as yet only able to fly
downwards. There was scarcely any hour from noon of the day (for some
of them had horns) to the small sweet hours when no one heard them,
that they forgot to salute the very large, quiet, wingless owl whom they
could espy moving about by day above their mouse-runs, or preening her
white and sometimes blue and sometimes grey feathers morning and evening
in a large square hole high up in the front wall. And they could not
understand at all why no swift depredating graces nor any habit of long
soft hooting belonged to that lady-bird.
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