February Days (Excerpt)二月天（节选）

The snow has gone from the landscape and the sun， at the hour of setting， has got round to the wood that crowns the hill on the other side of the valley. Soon it will set on the slope of the hill and then down on the plain. Then we shall know that spring has come. Two days ago a blackbird， from the paddock below the orchard， added his golden baritone to the tenor of the thrush who had been shouting good news from the beech tree across the road for weeks past. I don’t know why the thrush should glimpse the dawn of the year before the blackbird， unless it is that his habit of choosing the topmost branches of the tree gives him a better view of the world than that which the golden-throated fellow gets on the lower branches that he always affects. It may be the same habit of living in the top storey that accounts for the early activity of the rooks. They are noisy neighbours， but never so noisy as in these late February days， when they are breaking up into families and quarrelling over their slatternly2 household arrangements in the topmost branches of the elm trees. They are comic ruffians who wash all their dirty linen in public， and seem almost as disorderly and bad-tempered as the human family itself. If they had only a little of our ingenuity in mutual slaughter there would be no need for my friend the farmer to light bonfires underneath the trees in order to drive the female from the eggs and save his crops.

原野上的积雪已然消融，缓缓西沉的红日，已经转到谷地另一边山巅之上的那片树林。（剩余7950字）