io6 
XATURE XOTES 
of wild flowers and ferns which is going on at the hands 
of gypsies, trippers and villagers). The long green path, set 
with countless daffodils, which is one of the beauty spots of 
the neighbourhood, had been literally deflowered. The pre- 
ceding Saturday or Sunday a small horde of ravagers from the 
neighbouring seaside town had come here. They had been 
preceded by a riding school, which had cut the turf and many 
of the clumps of primroses and daffodils to pieces ; but the 
greatest damage had been done by school children and visitors 
to the seaside, who had been seized with a wild desire to 
uproot the daffodils, though they could hardly have got more 
than a few pence at most by selling them (it might be mentioned 
in parenthesis that all this was private property, though its 
owner does not oppose its being used by the public). In the 
farmstead great alterations had been going on during the 
winter, and the more picturesque buildings with their tiled roofs 
had been replaced by unsightly structures in corrugated iron, 
gleaming w'ith all the frightful inharmoniousness of its grey- 
white metal and sharp edges. The farmer told us that this 
was due to a desire for economy on the part of the laiidlord. 
Personally, he rather preferred it to the tiles — I cannot say why 
— but his own thoughts ran a good deal more in another channel. 
The foxes had again raided his wife’s poultry farm. He said 
it was a mockery for newspapers to advocate poultry farming in 
this or any other county where foxhunting was theoretically 
carried on. (He did not use the word “theoretically,” I supply 
that from my knowledge of the very hollow nature of the fox- 
hunting in this particular district. It is generally kept up by 
recently enriched people of considerable wealth, alien to the 
county, and in some cases to the country, who appreciate — but 
not quite rightly or proportionately — the varied and remarkable 
charms of English country life, and who ordain that there shall 
be foxhunting, and subsidize it accordingly.) The farmer went 
on to state that although complaints like his were met by the 
counter-assertion that the Hunt paid for the damage done by 
the foxes, it was well known, firstly, that when payment was 
made it was on a miserable scale, utterly disproportionate to 
the possibly prize birds the fox had destroyed; secondly, that 
you were looked upon disagreeably by the “gentry” if you 
made any claim for compensation at all ; while thirdly, if you 
dared to take the law into your own hands and trap, shoot or 
poi>^on the marauding fox . . . well, you might just as well 
give up your tenancy of the farm, which, like most of the land 
round here, was only let on a yearly lease. 
We tried to console ourselves for these shadows on the beauty 
of the countryside by walking home through what we thought 
an unfrequented lane, rich in all the charms of spring flowers 
and budding foliage. This, however, was strewn with paper, 
chiefly by picnicking motorists, so obtrusive an object that one 
could not take one’s eyes off it. 
