112 FIEID AND HEDGEROW. 
AMONG THE NUTS. 
THE nuts are ripening once more, and it is almost the 
time to go a-gipsying—the summer passes like the 
shadow of a cloud which strikes the edge of the yellow 
wheat and comes over and is gone ; it does not give you 
time to rub out a single ear of corn. Before it is pos- 
sible to gather the harvest of thought and observation” 
the summer has passed, and: we must bind the hastily. 
stitched book with the crimson leaves of autumn. Under 
these very hazel boughs only yesterday, ze. in May, 
looking for cuckoo-sorrel, as the wood-sorrel is called, 
there rolled down a brown last year’s nut from among 
the moss of the bank. In the side of this little brown 
nut, at its thicker end, a round hole had been made with 
a sharp tool which had left the marks of its chiselling, 
Through this hole the kernel had been extracted by the 
skilful mouse. Two more nuts were found on the same 
bank, bored by the same carpenter. The holes looked © 
as if he had turned the nut round and round as he 
gnawed. Unless the nut had shrunk, the hole was not 
large enough to pull the kernel out all at once ; it must 
have been eaten little by little in many mouthfuls. The 
same amount of nibbling would have sawn a circle round 
the nut, and so, dividing the shell in two, would have let 
the kernel out bodily—a plan more to our fancy; but 
