Country Life
By IAN NIALL EvLav year one seems to comment on seasonal or unscasonal weather at the onset of winter and ponders whether the December primrose is a promise of things to come or a sad reminder of a sort of Indian summer. At this moment a pigeon is cooing when 1 might have looked for him stuffing his crop with acorns beneath an oak, and yesterday 1 found a wasp on the window-sill and it was not a queen but a worker, perhaps a survivor of a great brood now deceased. Once I noted in my diary that a rabbit I shot late in November was carrying young and I remarked on this sort of thing to the keeper from a near-by estate when we met the other evening at the Wood Pigeon Shooting Club's supper. His own latest experience was of catching a rabbit in young in December, and his records, showing others breeding in January, com- pleted a full cycle of fertility. The pigeon didn't coo for long and these things are freakish, like holly berries in midsummer. They remind one, however, that the seasons remain uncertain and uncontrolled hi any way except, perhaps, in the hothouse and the hen battery.
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