At last came the golden month of the wild folk-- honey-sweet May, when the birds come back, and the flowers come out, and the air is full of the sunrise scents and songs of the dawning year.

The month of May is the pleasant time; its face is beautiful; the blackbird sings his full song, the living wood is his holding, the cuckoos are singing and ever singing; there is a welcome before the brightness of the summer.

It had been like this forever, thought Domenic Jejeune. For a thousand years and more, men and women had been greeted by these same sights and sounds as they worked these coastal marshes. The same play of sunlight on the waters, the same quiet rush of winds through the reeds. The ebb and flow of tides had changed the shape of lands over the centuries, but the essential rhythms of nature, the seasons, the weather patterns, those had remained constant for as long as humans had inhabited this land.

From his elevated wooden platform, Jejeune surveyed the coastline in a slow pass, squinting against the light spangles that bounced off the gently rippling water. Not a single element of modern life intruded. No buildings, no wires, no pylons. Just birds, by the hundred, resting on the tidal mudflats, or wheeling lazily in the sky above. And the sound, the beautiful sweet silence, broken only by the crush of the waves and the occasional plaintive call of a seabird. It brought a feeling as close to peace as Jejeune ever found these days.
p. 150

A charm of Goldfinches swooped in and settled on a stand of thistles, pecking at the down. It was a scene Jejeune had seen a thousand times on calendar pages, one of the most picturesque in nature. It still gave him a frisson of delight and he paused for a moment before speaking. p. 147

But Lord! To see the absurd nature of Englishmen, that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at everything that looks strange.

Is the spring coming?" he said. "What is it like?"...
"It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine...