Note 4 — The Little Cake-bird

It was a perfect day—one of those very rare days we are privileged to have once or twice in December month—and the moors were full of charm. The many pools on it were full of light, the boulder near the Piskey Circle was diamond bright in the sunshine, and above it the furze was already breaking into golden blossom. The purple had ‘pulsed’ out of the heath and the pink from the ling, but each little sprig was a marvel of brown, and showed up the silver lichen that splashed the brown. The bracken was brilliant in warm tones of orange and gold, the brambles were every shade of crimson and red, and the haze on the moors was like the bloom of the hurts,4 which still supplied food for the birds on the hills. In the direction of Roche, where the great Roche Rocks stand in lonely solitude, six hundred and eighty feet above the level of the sea, with the ruins of the little chapel dedicated to holy St. Michael on their summit, a lark went up singing into the blue, for larks, as most observers of nature know, are seldom out of song. The yellow-hammers were as bright as the brightly-coloured bracken, and sang their cheerful little lays from bramble and bush, and the streams rippled over the moors.