178 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
A farmer, near Weyhill, fallows his land witli two teams of 
asses ; one of which works till noon, and the other in the after- 
noon. When these animals have done their work, they are 
penned all night, hke sheep, on the fallow. In the winter they 
are confined and foddered in a yard, and make plenty of dung. 
Linnaeus says that hawks paciscuntur inducias cum avibus, 
quamdiu cuculus cuculat but it appears to me that, during that 
period, many little birds are taken and destroyed by birds of 
prey, as may be seen by their feathers left in lanes and under 
hedges. 
The missel-thrush is, while breeding, fierce and pugnacious, 
driving such birds as approach its nest, with great fury, to a 
distance. The Welch call it pen y llwyn, the head or master of 
the coppice. He suflfers no magpie, jay, or blackbird, to enter 
the garden where he haunts ; and is, for the time, a good guard 
to the new- sown legumens. In general he is very successful in 
the defence of his family : but once I observed in my garden, 
that several magpies came determined to storm the nest of a 
missel -thrush: the dams defended their mansion with great 
vigour, and fought resolutely ^ro aris et focis; but numbers at 
last prevailed, they tore the nest to pieces, and swallowed the 
young alive. 
In the season of nidification the wildest birds are compara- 
tively tame. Thus the ring-dove breeds in my fields, though 
they are continually frequented ; and the missel-thrush, though 
most shy and wild in the autumn and winter, builds in my 
garden close to a walk where people are passing all day long. 
Wall-fruit abounds with me this year ; but my grapes, that 
used to be forward and good, are at present backward beyond all 
precedent : and this is not the worst of the story ; for the same 
ungenial weather, the same black cold solstice, has injured the 
more necessary fruits of the earth, and discoloured and blighted 
our wheat. The crop of hops promises to be very large. 
Frequent returns of deafness incommode me sadly, and half 
disqualify me for a naturalist ; for, when those fits are upon me, 
I lose all the pleasing notices and little intimations arising from 
rural sounds ; and May is to me as silent and mute with respect 
to the notes of birds, &c., as August. My eyesight is, thank God, 
quick and good ; but with respect to the other sense, I am, at 
times, disabled: 
" And Wisdom at one entrance quite shut out." 
