172 Wild Life in a Southern County 



the grass grows rank and is of the deepest green. The 

 dove that could be heard cooing from the orchard built her 

 nest in the hawthorn, which, where it overhangs the grass 

 like a canopy, is bare of boughs for six or seven feet up 

 the gnarled stem. The cattle, who love to shelter under it 

 from the heat of the sun, browsed on the young shoots, so 

 that no branch could form ; but on the side towards the 

 ditch there are immense spiny thorns, long enough and 

 strong enough to make a savage's arrow-head or awl. The 

 doves do not seem nearly so numerons as the wood- 

 pigeons (doves, too, in strict language) ; they are much 

 smaller, rather duller in colour — that is, when flying past 

 — and are rarely seen more than two together. When the 

 summer thunder is booming yonder over the hills, and the 

 thin edge of the dark cloud showers its sweet refreshing 

 rain, with the sunshine gleaming through on the hedge 

 and grass here, between the rolling echoes the dove may 

 be heard in the bush coo-cooing still more softly and lov- 

 ingly to her mate. 



Just in the very angle formed by the meeting hedges 

 the ditch becomes almost a fosse, so broad and deep ; the 

 sandy banks have slipped, and the rabbits have excavated 

 more, and over all the brambles have arched thickly with 

 a background of brake-fern. The flower of the bramble 

 is very beautiful — a delicate pink bloom, succeeded by 

 green berries, to ripen red, and later black, under the sun. 

 A larger kind are found here and there — the children call 

 them dew-berries or jew-berries indifferently. Some of 

 the bramble leaves linger on a dull green all through the 

 winter. 



In the angle a narrow opening runs through between 

 the two banks, which do not quite meet : it is so over- 

 grown with bramble and fern, convolvulus and thorn, 



