34 JANUARY 



Anglia. It is a region of screens ; but these are partial 

 and planted, it must be confessed, much more for the 

 sake of high-flying game than as protection for the farm 

 or the user of the road. Now several sugar beets had 

 fallen on the road, just at the end of one of these edgings 

 of fir, by the boundary of a big and famous estate. 

 Perhaps the winds had gathered in a gust at the spot. 

 At any rate the split roots were many, and they served 

 as a rare attraction for the denizens of the grove. 



Those who drove cars along the road not only dis 

 turbed a feast : they were in continual danger of running 

 down the feasters. Pheasants are naturally tame birds 

 (till they get up in the air, when they fly faster than 90 per 

 cent, of our wild birds) ; and they ran out from the 

 trees in numbers, to the enjoyment of the fallen beet, 

 made soft and manageable by passing wheels. Personally, 

 I had never before seen them indulging in this particular 

 food ; but they caroused with such heedless intensity, 

 like wasps and earwigs in a rotten apple, that they would 

 scarcely consent to dodge the wheels. Now a famous 

 statesman once got into trouble with the cartoonists and 

 other humorists for averring that pheasants eat man 

 golds. They do eat mangolds, as I have seen on Fen 

 farms, but only very little bits. The great coarse bulbous 

 root is too hard for them, and perhaps too insipid. They 

 have difficulty in attacking a growing beet, for, like a 

 parsnip, its base does not rise above the surface ; but a 

 crushed beet in the road is a very different problem in 

 dietetics. 



All sorts of animals like sugary stuff ; and the suns of 

 1933 while they minished the size and bulk of the beets 

 converted a rare proportion of their pulp to sugar. In 

 some a whole quarter of the contents was neat sugar. 

 The pheasants were confessing to much the same canon 



