seems to demand your name.

The barn owls are more liable to be shot, because they are more
conspicuous; but, on the other hand, as they often breed and reside away
from covers, they seem to escape. For months past one of these has
sailed by my window every evening uttering a hissing 'skir-r-r.' Here,
some were nailed with their backs to the wall, that they might not hide
their guilty faces.

The delicate texture of the owl's feathers is very remarkable: these
birds remind me of a huge moth. The owls were more showy than the hawks,
though it is commonly said that without sunlight there is no colour--as
in the case of plants grown in darkness. Yet the hawks are day birds,
while the owls fly by night. There came the sound of footsteps; and I
retreated, casting one glance backward at the black and white, the blue
and brown colours that streaked the wall, while the dull green weasels
were in perpetual shadow. By night the bats would flit round and about
that gloomy place. It would not do to return by the same path, lest
another keeper might be coming up it; so I stepped into the wood itself.
To those who walk only in the roads, hawks and owls seem almost rare.
But a wood is a place to which they all flock; and any wanderer from the
north or west naturally tends thither. This wood is of large extent; but
even to the smaller plantations of the Downs it is wonderful what a
number come in the course of a year. Besides the shed just visited,
there would be certain to be another more or less ornamented near the
keeper's cottage, and probably others scattered about, where the
commoner vermin could be nailed without the trouble of carrying them far
away. Only the owls and hawks, magpies, and such more striking evidences
of slaughter were collected here, and almost daily renewed.

To get into the wood was much easier than to get out, on account of the
thick hedge, palings, and high sharp-sparred gates; but I found a dry
ditch where it was possible to creep under the bushes into a meadow
where was a footpath.

CHAPTER VI

LURCHER-LAND: 'THE PARK'

The time of the apple-bloom is the most delicious season in Sarsen
village. It is scarcely possible to obtain a view of the place, although
it is built on the last slope of the Downs, because just where the
ground drops and the eye expects an open space, plantations of fir and
the tops of tall poplars and elms intercept the glance. In ascending
from the level meadows of