IN SUMMER HEAT. 57 



stream, pool, or as a mere splash, you will find 

 the creatures you are in search of not far 

 from it. 



Some of the wilder park-lands have shown most 

 significantly how the heat has affected them, for 

 there has been an almost complete absence, in the 

 more exposed places, of certain creatures that in 

 ordinary seasons you never missed seeing if you 

 passed along. It is all owing to the great heat : 

 they have followed other creatures and gone for a 

 time to low moist dells and hollows, where the 

 grass grows green. Necessity recognises no law, 

 and to all intents and purposes the earth has been 

 bound as fast for all insect-feeding birds as it is 

 in mid-winter. 



The pewits have chased the rooks like a lot of 

 hawks striking at their quarry ; food they must have 

 of some kind, and in default of worms, grubs, and 

 wireworms, they have gone in for plovers' eggs, 

 when they could get them. As to fruit, I have 

 seen some barefaced depredations in that line. Yet 

 they will repay all these a thousand times before 

 long; for rain has come at last, and the rooks 

 and jackdaws, rejoicing greatly at the change, are 



