62 FROM SPRING TO FALL. 



and do adapt themselves to their surroundings. If 

 they did not, some would cease to exist. The 

 veracity of some writers has been questioned when 

 they wrote only the simple truth, because they 

 have seen animals and birds act in a certain 

 manner, influenced by their surroundings, in one 

 county ; whilst other writers, equally accurate, have 

 seen the same creatures act very differently in 

 another county, perhaps an adjoining one. The 

 nature or the food of the creature does not change ; 

 it simply alters some of its tactics in order to 

 procure that food, or for the purpose of self-pre- 

 servation. 



Numbers of birds have followed in each other's 

 traces to spots where the grass was growing green, 

 in search of the water which in some shape or 

 other was to be found there. The herons that 

 were not usually seen before the fall of the leaf, 

 when the trout run, have been wandering about 

 in the middle of the day fishing, for the streams 

 have been low, and all the fish, without exception, 

 have congregated in the deepest and most shady 

 water -holes they could find, under overhanging 

 boughs of trees. 



