BRITISH FERTILITY 195 



the shrill and piercing crescendo of the harvest-fly. 

 A young Englishman who hatl traveled over this 

 country told me he thought we liad the noisiest 

 nature in the world. English midsummer nature 

 is the other extreme of stillness. The long twilight 

 is unbroken by a sound, unless in places by the 

 "clanging rookery." The British bumblebee, a 

 hairy, short- waisted fellow, has the same soft, mel- 

 low bass as our native bee, and his habits appear 

 much the same, except that he can stand the cold 

 and the wet much better (I used to see them very 

 lively after sundown, when I was shivering with 

 my overcoat on), and digs his own hole like the 

 rabbit, which ours does not. Sitting in the woods 

 one day, a bumblebee alighted near me on the 

 ground, and, scraping away the surface mould, 

 began to bite and dig his way into the earth, — a 

 true Britisher, able to dig his own hole. 



In the matter of squirrel life, too, we are far 

 ahead of England. I believe there are more red 

 squirrels, to say nothing of gray squirrels, flying 

 squirrels, and chipmunks, within half a mile of my 

 house than in any county in England. In all my 

 loitering and prying about the woods and groves 

 there, I saw but two squirrels. The species is larger 

 than ours, longer and softer furred, and appears to 

 have little of the snickering, frisking, attitudinizing 

 manner of the American species. But England is 

 the paradise of snails. Tlie trail of the snail is 

 over all. I have counted a dozen on the bole of a 

 single tree. I have seen them hanging to the 



