WILD NATURE AND COUNTRY LIFE.*
THE author is what he describes himself on his title-page ; his calling has taken him into the woods at all seasons of the year, by night as well as by day ; and here he sets down what he has seen and heard. " Live and let live " is his motto, and he applies it to creatures of the garden as well as of the wood. Some of us, it is true, may envy the good fortune of a neighbour of his who, as he tells us, grew his heaviest crop of plums after a visitation of bullfinches, and we may prefer, too, to trust to spraying rather than sparrows to get rid of our caterpillars ; but we shall like him none the less for his kindly creed. He asks in another passage for legal protection for the badger, but is it needed ? Badgers, in some places, increased largely during the War, and are probably more numerous than most people imagine. Perhaps " A Woodman's " observations have been a little circumscribed, but they are seldom at fault. His records of the talk of countrymen are delightful ; this, for instance, of the notes of birds : " They yellowiammers, I can't do with they, with their bit of bread, bit of bread no cheese ; they tits, too, with their pinch 'em, pinch 'em ; give I they plovers in the spring, they says a bullock a wick for wicks and wicks, they be the boys for L" And it is only a man who has watched animals closely for years who can write as confidently as he does of animals' habits, as, for example, that no hare will go through a run in a hedge which has been fouled, so that a fox always spoils the run before starting the hare from her seat. Only one who is a woodman, again, at heart as well as by name, could write with so secure and intimate a touch of the felling and rinding of oaks—the best chapter in an engaging little book.
• Wild Nature and Country Life. By a Woodman. London ; T. Fisher Unwin. [6s4
Previous page
