404 AUTUMN AND WINTER 



ing them is to put a dozen ferrets or so into a stack and 

 shoot the rats as they appear on the roof. In thresh- 

 ing, the rats, which are as clever and courageous as any 

 animal, will lurk in the bottom of the stack till the very 

 last moment ; and many escape in this way. If a thin layer 

 of the stack is left over at night, the ' falling house ' will be 

 completely deserted the next morning. 



A stackyard full of fine ricks in October is often a green 

 meadow at the end of February. If the spring has been 

 open, corn and grass seed will have sprouted in brilliant 

 luxuriance. Not all the rats and mice, and sparrows and 

 finches, have destroyed the loose seed, which always seem to 

 grow up of a peculiarly vivid hue in such places. But the 

 grass gets the better of the corn. The one is incomparable 

 in the success of its struggle for life, the other makes a very 

 poor endeavour. If no corn were sown, but the crops left to 

 seed themselves, the plant would be almost extinct in a year 

 or two. One experiment, made at Rothamsted in Hertford- 

 shire, suggested that the plant would be completely exter- 

 minated by the third year. How different is the vigour oi 

 the grass. Where it finds itself there it abides. Along virgin 

 railways in a grassless country spring up, as it were, strips oi 

 meadow on either side the rails. The strips expand into any 

 open country that lies alongside, so that in a few years, as has 

 happened in parts of Newfoundland, fair pasture has sprung 

 from the few seeds of Timothy grass dropped from passing 

 loads of hay on the open trucks. One regrets this early ex- 

 tinction of the stackyards which rose so proudly in October ; 

 but the levelled yard and the green floor do not give a sense 

 of desolation such as the stackyard, seen not seldom in the 

 west, where the roofs are green. The corn sprouts through 

 the thatch, and the whole edifice appears to be mouldering 

 away. Thence too even the rats and mice depart. 



