THE LAST PATCH.
For a countryman, even if he has no use for a gun, few sights are more interesting than the cutting of the last rectangle of corn, or, indeed, of lucerne or sainfoin, in a harvest field. The cutters-and-binders, even when drawn by a noisy and rattling tractor, that you can hear all over the parish, fail to frighten either mammals or birds out of their shelter till the last possible moment ; and, indeed, the actual victims of the cutter are pitiably numerous. I saw some thirty pheasants rise from a line of wheat (in Lancashire) when only two swathe breadths of wheat were left. A number of hares (the field was near the scene of the Waterloo Cup) were the first to quit the doomed crop, but one of them did not leave till the strip was very narrow. The rats were the last to bolt, but a certain number of them ran out before the big batch of pheasants was induced to rise.
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