70 Wild Life in a Southern County 



to and fro, your footstep, returning on itself, passed the 

 thrush sitting on her nest calm and confident. 



No modern exotic evergreens ever attract our English 

 birds like the true old English trees and shrubs. In the 

 box and yew they love to build ; spindly laurels and rhodo- 

 dendrons, with vacant draughty spaces underneath, they 

 detest, avoiding them as much as possible. The common 

 hawthorn hedge round a country garden shall contain 

 three times as many nests, and be visited by five times as 

 many birds, as the foreign evergreens, so costly to rear and 

 so sure to be killed by the first old-fashioned frost. 



The thrushes are singularly fond of the yew berry ; 

 it is of a sticky substance, sweet and not unpleasant. 

 Holly berries, too, are eaten; and holly hedges, despite 

 their prickly leaves, are favourites with garden birds. It 

 would be possible, I think, to so plan out a garden as to 

 attract almost every feathered creature. 



A fine old filbert walk extends far away towards the 

 orchard: the branches meet overhead. In autumn the 

 fruit hangs thick ; and what is more exquisite, when 

 gathered from the bough and eaten, as all fruit should be, 

 on the spot ? I cannot understand why filbert walks are 

 not planted by our modern capitalists, who make nothing 

 of spending a thousand pounds in forcing-houses. I cannot 

 help thinking that true taste consists in the selection of 

 what is thoroughly characteristic of soil and climate. Those 

 magnificent yew hedges, the filbert walk — all, in fact, are 

 to be levelled to make way for a garish stucco-fronted 

 hunting-box, with staring red stables and every modern 

 convenience. The sun-dial shaft is already heaved up and 

 broken. 



The old mansion was used as a grammar school for a 

 great many years, but has been deserted for the last 



