226 NATURE IN DOWNLAND 



over the green hills, the wild garden is all for the 

 birds. They are many, and they feast every day and 

 all day long ; but for all their feasting the fruit is still 

 plentiful when, in early October, the devil flies abroad, 

 as some believe, to spit on the bramble-bushes and 

 make its berries uneatable. 



The elder is common on the downs, and ripens 

 early, and I have noticed that the berries are devoured 

 as fast as they ripen ; not, I think, because they taste 

 better than blackberries to the birds, but because they 

 are so easily gathered, and being small and round, are 

 easily swallowed whole even by the smallest bird. A 

 bird, as a rule, likes to swallow his fruit rather than 

 to peck at it ; he generally has to peck at the black- 

 berry, and, compared with the clusters of the elder- 

 berry, it is not so easily got at. 



Of our fruit-eating birds the missel-thrush is the 

 most common on the downs ; this bird loves the yew- 

 berry above all wild fruits, and there is one spot in 

 this district where he can feast on it as he cannot do 

 anywhere else in the kingdom. This is at the famous 

 "grove," as it is called, of yews at Kingly Bottom, in 

 one of the prettiest spots among the West Sussex 

 downs, near the small village of West Stoke, about 

 five miles from Chichester. The grove is an isolated 

 wood, or rather forest, composed almost wholly of yew 

 trees, growing in a broad combe in the side of a down ; 

 and above the dark-green of the yews the round light- 

 green summit is seen like a head crowned with a row 



