RAMBLES ABOUT NEWMARKET 213 



shape of the young spruce will almost ensure, at 

 any rate for some time. 



So good-bye for the time to the fine domains 

 (oases in deserts of waste) which have seen better 

 days, and those that have never, perhaps, been 

 so smartened up as now, when the old acres are 

 in new men's hands ; the churches, which some 

 of them could do with a little of the money spent 

 by the latest country squires on rough casting 

 and half-timbering cottage property ; the brooks 

 and the drains ; the little rivers ; and the odd 

 outlying scraps of fen, remnant, I presume, of a 

 period when the water was a good deal higher ; 

 the big fine trees that are lucky in their soil, 

 which is good, and the others who not being well 

 fed do their best on short commons and hard 

 blows; the cheery "hinds," who get over the 

 ground fast, and the quick-stepping team horses, 

 the wide-sided sheep, and the leggy lambs, the 

 wood-pigeons plunging out of their cover in the 

 tree-tops, and the peewits, who continually do 

 cry, but who if they — may I be rude enough to 

 say it ? — had sense enough to keep their mouths 

 shut need not put in use so many tricks to deceive. 

 The casual observer wouldn't know such things 

 as plovers were about unless they went out of 

 their way to advertise the fact. Please let me 

 take breath after that sentence, and in a fresh 

 start not forget the squirrels and the myriads of 

 moles, the small birds who have been woefully 

 deceived this season in nesting before the leaves 

 came out as they promised, and the greater birds 

 — pheasants and partridges — generally speaking, 

 all over the place ; the rabbits by the thousand and 

 the hares by the score ; the briars sweetly scent- 

 ing the air, whose force bruised them to the 



