ry 
Pheasants, 231 
breeze draws a different note: the bennets on the 
hillside go ‘sish, sish ;’ the oak in the copse roars 
and groans ; in the firs there is a deep sighing; the 
aspen rustles. In winter the bare branches sing a 
shrill ‘ sir-r-r.’ 
The elm, with its rough leaf, does not grow in the 
copse: it is a tree that prefers to stand clear on two 
sides at least. Oak and beech are here; on their 
lower branches a few brown leaves will linger all 
through the winter. Where a huge bough has been 
sawn from a crooked ill-grown oak a yellow bloated 
fungus has spread itself, and under it, if you lift it 
with a stick, the woodlice are crowded in the rotting 
stump. The beech boughs seem to glide about, 
round and smooth, snake-like in their easy curves. 
The bark of the aspen, and of the large willow poles, 
looks as if cut with the point of a knife, the cut 
having widened and healed with a rough scar. On 
the trunk of the silver-birch sometimes the outer bark 
peels and rolls up of itself. Seen from a distance, 
the leaves of this tree twinkle as the breeze bends the 
graceful hanging spray. 
The pheasants, that wander away from the pre- 
serves and covers up under the hills far down in the 
meadows as the acorns ripen, roost at night here in 
the copse ; and should a storm arise, after every flash 
of lightning gleaming over the downs the cocks among 
them crow. So, too, in the daytime, after every 
distant mutter of thunder the pheasant cocks crow in 
