FOREST TITHES 15 
who suffer from his depredations. If complaint is 
made in the right quarters, compensation is gene- 
rally most cheerfully given. Yet I have known 
some unhappy souls grunt even after they have 
received more pay than the ^case demanded. It 
is a hard thing to please folks. A fox, dog or 
vixen, never comes near man, woman, or child if 
he can help it ; but if hemmed in, he would be as 
dangerous as a collie dog is under the same circum- 
stances. 
At the foot of one of the South Down hills, where 
there is a long strip of coarse grass and moss, a 
quarter of a yard wide and over a mile long, there is o^e 
of the abiding places of the badger one well known 
to me. The land was once broken up by the plough, 
but this proved useless labour and expense, and now 
it is a paradise for wild creatures. That prince of 
British butterflies, the purple emperor, floats and 
dashes over this bit of moorland valley, crossing from 
one belt of oaks to another. The mossy-bee and the 
humble-bee have their homes in the moss surface, and 
our old friend, in his grey, black, and white coat 
scratches them out with his claws, or roots them up 
with his nose like a pig. In some of the moor 
districts he has been wiped out, and much it is to 
be regretted that those who have had the power to 
