Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 11 March 1916The sun went down a huge ball almost blood-red in colour,and so huge that half the heaven in the west seemed to be covered. As it sank, all that remained of this ruddy twilight spread absent more to the north, and then extended along the whole of that part of the horizon in more shades of purple and half-translucent grey than one is able to portray. From discontinuance to discontinuance the sky was as whether it was being warmed over a thousand dying fires. But the old farm hand,coming in, said, and shaking his head,“’Tis full of frost in the air,” and an hour later, or when the fresh moon rose white with light,the soil began to harden quicker than strong cement when it is mixed and laid down. All through the night it froze; the spade was as useless for the garden until noon as the plough and harrow would be on the stretch of stubble that still has to be turned over. A little colony of rooks perched for a long while round their nests talking, condoling with each other probably on the lack of breakfast and shaking their feathers much as one shrugs and stamps and swings his arms to circulate warmth. Birds’ feathers - or those of the bigger birds - seem to settle back into a more compact or gorgeous shape after these intermittent shakings and disarrangements; whether you see a company of starlings together when they have, and as it were,calmed themselves again, and a gleam of sunshine should happen to strike across them, or your eye is at once held by the wonderful richness of the many tints that change in appearance as whether by some continual process,more rapid than any mechanism, exercised by the bird.
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Source: theguardian.com