114 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
positive on one side or the other; he knows all 
about it, and is angry with his neighbours either 
because they do or do not kill their moles. There 
are always a few extremists. Every one has heard 
of Mr. Joseph Nunn, who maintains that the 
sparrow is the farmer’s best feathered friend, and 
is carried by his zeal to the length of declaring that 
all those who shoot the sparrow ought themselves 
to be shot. I hear of another farmer who buys 
moles from mole-catchers to put on his land; he 
is convinced that their presence is wholly bene- 
ficial, that when those inhabiting the lands adjoin- 
ing his farm have been killed off, his own moles 
flow out into these depleted grounds to enjoy the 
greater abundance of food they find there; and it 
is to make good this loss inflicted on him by the 
ignorance and stupidity of his neighbours that he 
is obliged to act as he does. 
Recently I was with a man who takes the 
opposite view; one who revolves schemes and 
projects for the suppression of the mole. This 
enemy of the mole is in possession of three or four 
water-meadows, infested by these animals to an 
extraordinary degree. As he is partly dependent 
for a livelihood on a few milch-cows he keeps, the 
condition of this meadow land is a matter of im- 
portance to him; and he has come to the con- 
clusion that he loses a large portion (a fourth, he 
imagines) of his grass crop on account of the 
uneven condition of the surface caused by the 
moles. It is true that he could roll the ground, 
