FOREST TITHES 
relief of the land. It is to be hoped they will be 
unmolested and their usefulness universally recognised. 
Sir Herbert Maxwell has used his local influence, I 
believe, to this end. 
The weasels were noticed all making their way 
to the parts where the mice were gathered. Then 
the mice shifted their quarters, but the weasels fol- 
lowed. Two or three families, the old ones and their 
half-grown kittens, will soon move mice where they 
are about. Four or five ferocious old grey rats will 
kill more poultry of all kinds and steal more eggs 
than all the weasel family in a district 
Anyone walking on the roads that are only sepa- 
rated from the cornfields by low hedges in our out- 
lying country districts, in the dusk of the evening, after 
the corn has been carried, can see some very pretty 
hunting ; for then the rats come to the fields and live 
for a time in the hedgerows. If you go very quietly 
and look over one of the field-gates, you will see 
dusky, bunched-up forms some eight or ten yards 
from the hedge ; rats these are, feeding on the scat- 
tered grain. Presently they go loping up and down, 
with their peculiar gait, making for the cover of the 
hedge. There was nothing apparently in the field la 
have alarmed them, so we look upwards, and see at 
once what it was that caused them to seek the cover 
