MIXED DAYS OF MAY AND DECEMBER. 217 



not had any settled, soft, warm weather till after mid- 

 summer. There has been a steady continual cold draught 

 from the northward till the sun reached the solstice, so 

 that the summers, in fact, have not commenced till the 

 end of June. There is a good deal of general truth in 

 this observation ; certainly we seem to have lost our 

 springs. I do not think I have heard it thunder this 

 year up to the time of writing. The absence of electri- 

 cal disturbance shows a peculiar state of atmosphere 

 unfavourable to growth, so that the corn will not hide a 

 partridge, and in some places hardly a sparrow. Where 

 did the painters get their green leaves from this year in 

 time for the galleries ? Not from the trees, for they had 

 none. 



A flock of rooks was waddling about in a thinly 

 grown field of corn which scarcely hid their feet, and a 

 number of swallows, flying very low, scarcely higher than 

 the rooks' breasts, wound in and out among them. The 

 day was cloudy and cold, and probably the insects had 

 settled on the ground. The rooks' feet stirred them up, 

 and as they rose they were taken by the swallows. All 

 over the field there were no other swallows, nor in the ad- 

 jacent fields, only in that one spot where the rooks were 

 feeding. On another occasion swallows flying low over 

 a closely cropped grass field alighted on the sward to try 

 and catch their prey. There seems a scarcity of some 

 kinds of insect life, due doubtless to the wind. Out of a 

 dozen butterfly chrysalids collected, six were worthless ; 

 they were stiff, and when opened were stuffed full of small 

 white larvae, which had eaten away the coming butterfly 

 in its shell. They were the offspring of a parasite insect, 

 which thus provided for the sustenance of its young by 

 eating up other young, after the cruel way of nature. Why 

 does one robin carefully choose a thatched eave for its nest, 



