206 Pheasants. 



fungus has spread itself, and under it, if you lift it 

 with a stick, the wood-lice are crowded in the rotting 

 stump. The beech boughs seem to glide about, 

 round and smooth, snake-like in their easy curves. 

 The bark of the aspen, and of the large willow poles, 

 looks as if cut with the point of a knife, the cut hav- 

 ing widened and healed with a rough scar. On the 

 trunk of the silver-birch sometimes the outer bark 

 peels and rolls up of itself. Seen from a distance, 

 the leaves of this tree twinkle as the breeze bends 

 the graceful hanging spray. 



The pheasants, that wander away from the pre- 

 serves and covers up under the hills far down in the 

 meadows as the acorns ripen, roost at night here in 

 the copse ; and should a storm arise, after every flash 

 of lightning gleaming over the downs the cocks 

 among them crow. So, too, in the daytime, after 

 every distant mutter of thunder the pheasant cocks 

 crpw in the preserves, and some declare they can see 

 the flash, even though invisible to human eyes, at 

 noon-day. 



Clustering cones hang from the firs, fringing the 

 copse on one side first green, and then a pale buff, 

 and falling at last hard and brown to strew the earth 

 beneath. Tn the thick foliage of this belt of firs the 

 starlings love to roost. If you should be passing 

 along any road east, north, west, or south a 

 mile or two distant, as the sun is sinking and even- 

 ing approaching, suddenly there will come a rushing 

 sound in the air overhead : it is a flock of starlings 

 flying in their determined manner straight for the 

 distant copse. From every direction these flocks 

 converge upon it : some large, some composed only 



