COUNTRY LIFE
WHEN I used to shoot regularly, a distant wood was one of my- favourite haunts. It was a great place for wood-pigeons. Rabbits were abundant there, and sometimes an old cock pheasant rose on the verge of the bracken and startled me with the explosion of his flight. 1 remember I shot eight woodcock on the same slope. Since then I have changed my habits and put away the gun, and for that reason the wood has not known me since, but, passing the spot on- a warm Sunday afternoon, we decided to picnic there, and I trod the old familiar ground again. I have been told never to go back to places in which I once found delight, and I feel there is some justification for the advice. The wood has all but gone. Here and there a rotting pine stands on a hillock. Heather and scrub compete for space in a jungle of debris and rotting stumps. The ground is .ploughed in places by the wheels of tree-hauling equipment. Sometimes a flight of pigeons goes over or a curlew bubbles on the bare skyline, but nothing lives there now but a fox or two and a few stoats. I am sorry for the farmer whose kitchen-windows overlook the scene. He must have enjoyed the crowing of the pheasant and the gentle nodding of the trees in the wind, and he has nothing to look at now but a devastation like a battlefield.
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