visited in spring and autumn.

Nor do the meadows seem to produce so many varieties of grass as farther
to the south-west. But beetles of every kind and size, from the great
stag beetle, helplessly floundering through the evening air and clinging
to your coat, down to the green, bronze, and gilded species that hasten
across the path, appear extremely numerous. Warm, dry sands, light
soils, and furze and heath are probably favourable to them.

From this roadside I have seldom heard the corncrake, and never once the
grasshopper lark. These two birds are so characteristic of the meadows
in southwestern counties that a summer evening seems silent to me
without the "crake, crake!" of the one and the singular sibilous rattle
of the other. But they come to other places not far distant from the
road, and one summer a grasshopper-lark could be heard in some meadows
where I had not heard it the two preceding seasons. On the mounds field
crickets cry persistently.

At the end of the hedge which is near a brook, a sedge-reedling takes up
his residence in the spring. The sedge-reedlings here begin to call very
early; the first date I have down is the 16th of April, which is, I
think, some weeks before they begin in other localities. In one ditch
beside the road (not in this particular hedge) there grows a fine bunch
of reeds. Though watery, on account of the artificial drains from the
arable fields, the spot is on much higher ground than the brook, and it
is a little singular that while reeds flourish in this place they are
not to be found by the brook.

The elms of the neighbourhood, wherever they can be utilised as posts,
are unmercifully wired, wires twisted round, holes bored and the ends of