ey circled round, singing; the instant one ceased another took
it up, a perfect madrigal. In the evening, at eight o'clock, I found
them there again, still singing. The same detached groups of trees are
much frequented by wood-pigeons, especially towards autumn.

Rooks prefer to perch on the highest branches, wood-pigeons more in the
body of the tree, and when the boughs are bare of leaves a flock of the
latter may be recognised in this way as far as the eye can see, and when
the difference of colour is rendered imperceptible by distance. The
wood-pigeon when perched has a rounded appearance; the rook a longer and
sharper outline.

By one corner of the copse there is an oak, hollow within, but still
green and flourishing. The hollow is black and charred; some mischievous
boys must have lighted a fire inside it, just as the ploughboys do in
the far away country. A little pond in the meadow close by is so
overhung by another oak, and so surrounded with bramble and hawthorn,
that the water lies in perpetual shade. It is just the spot where, if
rabbits were about, one might be found sitting out on the bank under the
brambles. This overhanging oak was broken by the famous October snow,
1880, further splintered by the gales of the next year, and its trunk is
now split from top to bottom as if with wedges.

These meadows in spring are full of cowslips, and in one part the
meadow-orchis flourishes. The method of making cowslip balls is
universally known to children, from the most remote hamlet to the very
verge of London, and the little children who dance along the green sward
by the road here, if they chance to touch a nettle, at once search for a
dock leaf to lay on it and assuage the smart. Country children, and
indeed older folk, call the foliage of the knotted figwort cutfinger
leaves, as they are believed to assist the cure of a cut or sore.

Raspberry suckers shoot up in one part of the copse; the fruit is
doubtless eaten by the birds. Troops of them come here, travelling along
the great hedge by the wayside, and all seem to prefer the outside trees
and bushes to the interior of the copse. This great hedge is as wide as
a country double mound, though it has but one ditch; the thick hawthorn,
blackthorn, elder, and bramble--the oaks, elms, ashes, and firs form, in
fact, almost a cover of themselves.

In the early spring, when the east wind rushes with bitter energy across
the plains, this immense hedge, as far as it e