fe
of nations and races of men. It is, I imagine, a sense capable of
cultivation, and enables us to look upon many of man's doings that would
otherwise vex and pain us, and, as some say, destroy all the pleasure
of our lives, not exactly as an illusion, as if we were Japanese and
had seen a fox in the morning, but at all events in what we call a
philosophic spirit.

What troubled me most was the consideration of the effect of the new
conditions on the wild life of the plain--or of a very large portion
of it. I knew of this before, but it was nevertheless exceedingly
unpleasant when I came to witness it myself when I took to spying on
the military as an amusement during my idle time. Here we have tens of
thousands of very young men, boys in mind, the best fed, healthiest,
happiest crowd of boys in all the land, living in a pure bracing
atmosphere, far removed from towns, and their amusements and
temptations, all mad for pleasure and excitement of some kind to fill
their vacant hours each day and their holidays. Naturally they take to
birds'-nesting and to hunting every living thing they encounter during
their walks on the downs. Every wild thing runs and flies from them, and
is chased or stoned, the weak-winged young are captured, and the nests
picked or kicked up out of the turf. In this way the creatures are being
extirpated, and one can foresee that when hares and rabbits are no
more, and even the small birds of the plain, larks, pipits, wheatears,
stonechats, and whincats, have vanished, the hunters in khaki will take
to the chase of yet smaller creatures--crane-flies and butterflies and
dragon-flies, and even the fantastic, elusive hover-flies which the
hunters of little game will perhaps think the most entertaining fly of
all.

But it would be idle to grieve much at this small incidental and
inevitable result of making use of the plain as a military camp and
training-ground. The old god of war is not yet dead and rotting on his
iron hills; he is on the chalk hills with us just now, walking on the
elastic turf, and one is glad to mark in his brown skin and sparkling
eyes how thoroughly alive he is.

A little after midnight on the morning of June 21, 1908, a Shrewton
cock began to crow, and that trumpet sound, which I never hear without a
stirring of the blood, on account of old associations, informed me that
the late moon had risen or was about to rise, linking the midsummer
evening and morning twilights, and I