262 Seeds and Sowers 



flew in June, is filled with the thistle-like seed- 

 heads of the knapweed, which the mice have felled 

 and carried in the dry September nights. All the 

 heads are more or less torn and fretted by the 

 mouse's teeth ; but these little creatures are as 

 wasteful as they are tireless, and always seem to 

 spoil more than they eat. The seeds of the cle- 

 matis, which ripen in October, are the most abund- 

 ant of their dainties in the chalk or limestone regions 

 where the plant is common, but many other seeds 

 and berries make up these dense, mixed heaps. 

 The stones of hawthorn and whitebeam berries have 

 the fleshy fruit stripped off, and the kernel extracted 

 through a small round hole. Unlike dormice, 

 which often curl up and go to sleep in a new bird's 

 nest, when they discover it on their travels in 

 spring, the wood-mice seem never to use these nests 

 as sleeping- chambers, but simply as dining rooms 

 and storehouses. The dormouse's store of hazel- 

 nuts is usually hidden in or near its winter nest, 

 which is placed in some dry hollow on the ground, 

 and not in the twigs where it spends the summer. 

 But the dormouse grows fat for his slumbers chiefly 

 by feeding on hazelnuts in the nights and duller 

 days of mid-autumn. Beneath the hazel-boughs 

 in the hollow Berkshire lanes, the dry ditches are 

 thickly strewn with nutshells of many different 

 years, each drilled almost as neatly, on a larger 

 scale, as the delicate perforations of the wood-mice 

 in the seeds of a rose-hip or a hawthorn-stone. 



Mice and squirrels probably aid in the autumn 

 work of distributing seeds and berries, by burying 



