290 TEN YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING 
moles and men, the partridge stuck to her task, and, 
to the surprise of several people, hatched a mammoth 
brood. I have had many a good nest ruined bya 
mole, especially in dry weather; I suppose the soil 
beneath the nest remains comparatively moist, and 
so is easier to burrow in, and more likely to contain 
food, 
There must be hundredweights of honey stored 
away in the dark caverns of old stumps and in hollow 
trees—storehouses where truant bees have garnered 
the sweet essence of myriads of flowers, and year 
after year, generation after generation, have added 
to their unsuspected treasure. A bricklayer who 
kept bees went into a. wood to pick some nuts; he 
returned, and took sixty odd pounds of honey from 
an old oak-stump, within a few yards of the road. 
When we were rabbiting, my mate and I went over 
practically every yard of the woods, and we found it 
paid to examine every stump. The most honey we 
ever found in one stump was twenty-seven pounds ; 
but most years we got a useful supply—sharing the 
honey, and my mate having the wax for straining 
the honey. Whether it was our fancy I cannot say, 
but we never would admit that the flavour of any 
honey equalled that of the wild, from the woods. 
Once I gained a reward for recovering a lost dog. 
It was a beautiful black spaniel ; part of her history 
never will be known, but here is the skeleton of it 
for three months. She was being sent by train—I 
