234 WILD LIFE IN A SOUTHERN COUNTY. 



The elm, with its rough leaf, does not grow in the 

 copse ; it is a tree that prefers to stand clear on two 

 sides at least. Oak and beech are here ; on their 

 lower branches a few brown leaves will linger all 

 through the winter. Where a huge bough has been 

 sawn from a crooked, ill-grown oak, a yellow, bloated 

 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 having 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 preserves 

 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 crow in the preserves, and 

 some declare they can see the flash, even though in- 

 visible to human eyes, at noonday. 



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. In the thick foliage of this belt of firs the 



