FRUITFUL HEDGEROWS 121 



Nature is apt to make good its general average by a surpris- 

 ing outburst of vigour. There is a great sense of delight in 

 an autumn in which every wild tree and shrub is loaded 

 with fruits and berries after its kind, and the earth beneath 

 is strewn with the shakings of their boughs. It is good to 

 see the earth heaped high with harvest, even though much 

 of the increase brings no profit to the purse or the granaries 

 of man. Blackbirds make festival over the fallen crab- 

 apples yellowing the mire of the lanes, where a scent of the 

 earth's October wine streams down the wind in the dusk. 

 Squirrels crunch the winged bunches of hornbeam seeds, 

 balancing among the bending twigs ; and the herds of swine 

 bring back a forest picture of earlier days, as they rove in the 

 October sunshine, and champ the thick layers of oak-mast 

 or the fallen chestnuts. Rooks and wood-pigeons and 

 pheasants gorge under the oaks in the quieter fields ; and 

 flocks of bramblings and chaffinches flicker under the beech- 

 trees in quest of their ruddier crop. Birds and beasts hold 

 harvest-home all the shortening day ; and when night falls, 

 the busy mice collect their stores till morning, and leave the 

 linnets' nests fuller in the hedgerows. Under the hunter's 

 moon the moist woods breathe the exquisite aroma of dis- 

 solving oak-leaves, most tonic of all the perfumes of the 

 year; and deep in the sighing lanes the acorns still patter in 

 their fall. 



Early in autumn the scarlet berries of the cuckoo-pint 

 begin to ripen in the lee of the hedges, and the thinning 

 herbage of October sets them gleaming above the new-fallen 

 leaves. Conspicuous in early spring, this wild arum is 

 eclipsed, like most other spring hedgeside plants, when 

 the herbage begins to shoot high. But unlike the primrose 

 and bluebell, of which little is seen again until spring, the 

 cuckoo-pint finds a second period of conspicuousness in its 



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