THE FAERY YEAR 



stoats, and so, by the survival of the fittest, came to 

 recognize it as a foe, and handed the instinct down 

 the generations. 



Copse Grasses 



With the blossoming of traveller's joy, we cannot 

 hide from ourselves that the last group of summer 

 flowers has come. The melic grass is seeding in the 

 shady hedgerows, and many of the other grasses are 

 a little past their prime of beauty ; the wild oat is all 

 in deshabille. But the copse grasses have not been 

 burnt to ripeness so soon as those of the hedgerow 

 we have another month in which to admire these. 

 I never could say what I felt of the exquisite show 

 of the speckly copse grasses in July and August. 

 One should plunge knee-deep into the dense under- 

 growth of the copse grasses and the brake ferns, 

 and spend great part of the summer day with them. 

 The day quiet, in copses that seem birdless save for 

 yellow-hammer and wood pigeon, is not so full of 

 charm as the evening and night lull ; there is not 

 the sense of personality about it it is more familiar. 



But we can enjoy hour on hour of it in the 

 grassy coppice, and want more. One of the choicest 

 of all the grasses grows in sunny glades in the young 

 wood the bent grass. On such a midget scale is 

 its flowering system that a dozen of its petty spike- 

 lets sometimes more than a dozen set in a line 

 touching each other, will scarcely cover an inch. At 

 1 80 



