lO 
NATURE NOTES 
the front door barks vigorously, and a strong force of chaffinches 
leave the crumbs which they have been eating on the brick 
causeway. The penetrating notes of titmouse major are heard 
from an old apple tree, but the full song will not develop yet 
awhile. With a ghic, ghic, and ludicrous clatter and cackle, a 
blackbird clears the wall like a cat. Again jenny wren shows 
herself — why, let us see, five days ago was the feast of St. 
Stephen, on which festival until quite recently Irish boys were 
accustomed to hunt the wren for her alleged “ bewrayal ” of 
the Irish by tapping on a drum. 
“ The wian, the wran, the king \_sic'\ of all birds, 
St. Stephen’s Day she was caught in the furze.” 
Following the hedgerow to look for old nests, one notices 
a number of little silky oval pouches ; close examination dis- 
covers a hole at one end. These cobweb purses are the late 
homes of the pupae of vapourer moths. The female of these 
plainly coloured insects uses her last abode as the spot to 
deposit her eggs. The hawthorn twigs have not yet assumed 
the pinkish tinge of returning spring. Near the hedge is some 
gorse, its yellow flowers on a dark ground looking like cloth of 
velvet and gold. Gorse would appear to be the southern name, 
in Yorkshire and Cumberland it is whin, here it is furze. 
The field road ends, and here is the railway station. Give the 
waiting room fire a vigorous poke. Let the wind sough and 
groan, let the seaward plain look never so gloomy, and the 
storm-wracked sky never so fierce and forbidding : it is well, 
for we will not stir hence for the present. 
Battersea. Walter Johnson. 
CHAUCER’S STUDY OF NATURE. 
an ancient MS. of the fourteenth century there is a 
portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer. In the upper right-hand 
corner, where it was the custom to insert the coat-of- 
arms, there is a delicately worked representation of a 
daisy plant in full bloom. The artist was happy in his design, 
for Chaucer has come down to us as the poet who not only 
chose a flower for the theme of much of his work, but who 
placed the charms of the humble daisy above all other flowers. 
It is the “ Eye of Day, the Empress and the flower of flowers 
all,” he tells us, and he has neither English rhyme nor prose 
sufficient to sing its many charms. 
The list of plants named by Chaucer in his poems would be 
outnumbered any day by the plants gathered on one of our 
Saturday afternoon Field Club rambles. But probably they 
were pretty nearly all that were known by town dwellers and 
