AN ARCADIAN CALENDAR 



THE farmer is wroth if he finds a mole-cricket among 

 his potatoes, but probably it is engaged 

 The only on seeking wire- worms. This insect is 



Burrowing built on the lines of the mole, and is 

 Cricket furnished with digging implements even 

 more wonderful than the mole's, while it 

 wears a hood, for sheltering its head, with hairs as fine 

 as the gentleman's in velvet. The wonder of the creature 

 is in its powerful front legs, at once digging and cutting 

 implements, with points like the teeth of a saw, across 

 which another toothed part of the foot works like a 

 cutting-blade, to sever roots when burrowing. 



AN old farmer gave us an interesting point about old 

 barns: in his grandfather's time, he said, 

 Feathered when grain was stored in the great barns, 

 Mausers a man building a new barn would leave 

 what was called an " owl hole " under the 

 gable, so that barn owls might be free to come and go, 

 and encouraged to hunt the rats and mice. Barns 

 always have a strong attraction for these owls (as for 

 sparrows and swallows) ; barns or belfries they seem to 

 think their ideal nesting sites, though some owls like 

 holes in trees, even if the tree be already occupied by 

 nesting jackdaws and starlings. They are in no way 

 particular about seclusion; and passers-by often hear, 

 sometimes to their alarm, the heavy snoring of the birds 

 in the nest. 



158 



