At that the rough man looked at me very sharply, and answered stiffly,
"Not as I know of."

A few weeks later, at a small town in the neighbourhood, I got into
conversation with a hotel keeper, an intelligent man, who gave me a good
deal of information about the country. He asked me where I was staying,
and, on my telling him, said "Ah, I know it well--that village in a
hole; and a very nasty hole to get in, too--at any rate it was so,
formerly. They are getting a bit civilized now, but I remember the time
when a stranger couldn't show himself in the place without being jeered
at and insulted. Yes, they were a rough lot down in that hole--the
Badgers, they were called, and that's what they are called still."

The pity of it was that I didn't know this before I went among them! But
it was not remembered against me that I had wounded their
susceptibilities; they soon found that I was nothing but a harmless
field naturalist, and I had friendly relations with many of them.

At the extremity of the straggling village was the beginning of an
extensive common, where it was always possible to spend an hour or two
without seeing a human creature. A few sheep grazed and browsed there,
roaming about in twos and threes and half-dozens, tearing their fleeces
for the benefit of nest-building birds, in the great tangled masses of
mingled furze and bramble and briar. Birds were abundant there--all
those kinds that love the common's openness, and the rough, thorny
vegetation that flourishes on it. But the village--or rather, the large
open space occupied by it, formed the headquarters and centre of a
paradise of birds (as I soon began to think it), for the cottages and
houses were widely separated, the meanest having a garden and some
trees, and in most cases there was an old orchard of apple, cherry, and