BRITISH FERTILITY. 213 



night or day, that I could ever hear. We have a 

 large orchestra of insect musicians, ranging from that 

 tiny performer that picks the strings of his instru- 

 ment so daintily in the summer twilight, to the shrill 

 and piercing crescendo of the harvest-fly. A young 

 Englishman who had traveled over this country told 

 me he thought we had the noisiest nature in the 

 world. English midsummer nature is the other ex- 

 treme of stillness. The long twilight is unbroken by 

 a sound, unless in places by the " clanging rookery." 

 The British bumble-bee, a hairy, short-waisted fellow, 

 has the same soft, mellow 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 shiver- 

 ing with my overcoat on), and digs his own hole 

 like the rabbit, which ours does not. Sitting in the 

 woods one day, a bumble-bee alighted near me on the 

 ground, and, scraping away the surface mould, began 

 to bite and dig his way into the earth a true Brit- 

 isher, 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 



