Haunts of the Lapwing 



sweeps away everything, is for a while repelled; the 

 oak will grow when the time we know is forgotten, 

 and when felled will be the mainstay and safety of 

 a generation in a future century. That the plant 

 should start among the grass, to be severed by the 

 scythe or crushed by cattle, is very pitiful; I cannot 

 help wishing that it could be transplanted and pro- 

 tected. Of the countless acorns that drop in autumn 

 not one in a million is permitted to become a tree 

 a vast waste of strength and beauty. From the 

 bushes by the stile on the left hand, which I have just 

 passed, follows the long whistle of a nightingale. 

 His nest is near; he sings night and day. Had I 

 waited on the stile, in a few minutes, becoming used 

 to my presence, he would have made the hawthorn 

 vibrate, so powerful in his voice when heard close at 

 hand. There is not another nightingale along this 

 path for at least a mile, though it crosses meadows 

 and runs by hedges to all appearance equally suitable; 

 but nightingales will not pass their limits ; they seem 

 to have a marked-out range as strictly defined as the 

 lines of a geological map. They will not go over to 

 the next hedge hardly into the field on one side of a 

 favourite spot, nor a yard farther along the mounoL 

 Opposite the oak is a low fence of serrated green. 

 Just projecting above the edge of a brook, fast-grow- 

 ing flags have thrust up their bayonet-tips. Beneatk 

 their stalks are so thick in the shallow places that a 

 pike can scarcely push a way between them. Over 

 the brook stand some high maple trees ; to their thick 

 foliage wood-pigeons come. The entrance to a coomb, 

 the widening mouth of a valley, is beyond, with copses 

 on the slopes. 



Again the plover's notes; this time in the field 

 immediately behind; repeated, too, in the field on 

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