His mother had set her heart on making a large wranny-pie (that is,
wren-pie, but actually it includes all manner of birdlings). It was
to be the largest in the parish. She was vain of young John's
prowess, and would quote it when old John grumbled that the lad was
slow as a smith. "And yet," said old John, "backward isn't the word
so much as foolish. Up to a point he understands iron 'most so well
as I understand it myself. Then some notion takes him, and my back's
no sooner turned than he spoils his job. Always trying to make iron
do what iron won't do--that's how you may put it." The wife, who was
a silly woman, and (like many another such) looked down on her
husband's trade, maintained that her boy ought to have been born a
squire, with game of his own.

Young John went up to Balmain; and there, sure enough, he found
wrens and titlarks flitting about everywhere, cheeping amid the
furze-bushes on the low stone hedges and the granite boulders,
where the winter rains had hollowed out little basins for themselves,
little by little, working patiently for hundreds of years.
The weather was cold, but still and sunny. As he climbed, the sea at
first made a blue strip beyond the cliff's edge on his right, then
spread into a wide blue floor, three hundred feet below him, and all
the width of it twinkling. Ahead and on his left all the moorland
twinkled too, with the comings and goings of the birds. The wrens
mostly went about their business--whatever that might be--in a sharp,
practical way, keeping silence; but the frail note of the titlarks
sounded here, there, everywhere.

Young John might have shot scores of them. But, as he headed for the
old mine-house of Balmain and the cromlech, or Main-Stone, which