1 
222 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
are working at the clover it is too silent ; so I think we 
may begin our almanack with the house-fly and the moth 
and the spider and the ant on the cucumber frame, and 
so on, till, finally, the catalogue culminates with the 
great yellow wasp. He is the final sign of summer; 
one swallow does not make it, one wasp does. Heisa 
connoisseur of the good things of the earth, and comes 
not till their season. 
On the top of an old wall covered with broad masses 
_ of lichen, the patches of which grew out at their edges 
as if a plate had taken to spreading at its rim, the tits 
were much occupied in picking out minute insects ; the 
wagtails came too, sparrows, robins, hedge-sparrows, and 
occasionally a lark ; a bare blank wall to all appearance, 
and the bare lichen as devoid of life to our eyes. Yet 
there must have been something there for all these eager 
bills—eggs or pupe. A jackdaw, with iron-grey patch 
‘on the back of his broad poll, dropped in my garden 
one morning, to the great alarm of the small birds, and 
made off with some large dark object in his beak—some 
beetle or shell probably, I could not distinguish which, 
and should most likely have passed the spot. without 
seeing it. The sea-kale, which had been covered up 
carefully with seaweed, to blanch and to protect it from 
the frost, was attacked in the cold dry weather in a most 
furious manner by blackbirds, thrushes, and starlings. 
They tore away the seaweed with their strong bills, 
pitching it right and left behind them in as workman- 
like style as any miner, and so boring deep notches into 
the edge of the bed. When a blackbird had made a 
good hole he came back to visit it at various times of . 
the day, and kept a strict watch. If he found any 
other blackbird or thrush infringing on his diggings, he 
drove him away ferociously. Never were such works 
