A GAMELESS PARISH.
First, you may tramp over a thousand acres and scarcely find a game bird, though the year has been exceptionally favourable to their breeding. The great hedges over which once many coveys flew—to their destruction—are greater and wilder than ever, but it would be waste of any sports- man's time to try to drive birds over them. The birds have vanished. Why these birds have vanished is clear enough. Wherever you walk, in high hedges, in trees and in the spinneys are the remains of a number of magpies' nests, and you see almost as many magpies as along certain roads in France. They are so numerous that even the few poultry- keepers are harassed. Within an hour or two I saw, without search, stoats, weasels, hedgehogs, a great number of strayed and, I should say, half-wild cats, and two foxes lay out in one grass field. The number of little owls (first enlarged, as it happened, in this immediate neighbourhood) was astonishing, and their squeaky hunting cry was heard in the middle of the afternoon.
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