wooden mills are also characteristic.

Mouchers come along the road at all times and seasons, gathering
sacksful of dandelions in spring, digging up fern roots and cowslip mars
for sale, cutting briars for standard roses, gathering water-cresses and
mushrooms, and in the winter cutting rushes.

There is a rook with white feathers in the wing which belongs to an
adjacent rookery, and I have observed a blackbird also streaked with
white. One January day, when the snow was on the ground and the frost
was sharp, when the pale sun seemed to shine brightest round the rim of
the disk, as if there were a band of stronger light there, I saw a white
animal under a heap of poles by the wayside, near the great hedge I have
mentioned. It immediately concealed itself, but, thinking that it was a
ferret gone astray, I waited, and presently the head and neck were
cautiously protruded.

I made the usual call with the lips, but the creature instantly returned
to cover. I waited again, hiding this time, and after an interval the
creature moved and hastened away from the poles, where it was, in a
measure, exposed, to the more secure shelter of some bushes. Then I saw
that it was of a clear white, while so-called white ferrets are usually
a dingy yellow, and the white tail was tipped with black. From these
circumstances, and from the timidity and anxious desire to escape
observation, I could only conclude that it was a white stoat.

Stoats, as remarked previously, are numerous in these hedges, and it was
quite possible for a white one to be among them. The white stoat may be
said to exactly resemble the ermine. The interest of the circumstance
arises not from its rarity, but from its occurring so near the