ing a bad fall
he alighted by a tree, behind which he thought to dodge them. But no
sooner did he touch the ground than the bucks so furiously rushing
after him stopped dead in their career; he stepped towards them, and
directly they saw him walking they retreated hastily to a distance.

The first berries to go as the autumn approaches are those of the
mountain-ash. Both blackbirds and thrushes began to devour the
pale-red bunches hanging on the mountain-ashes as early as the 4th of
September last year. Starlings are fond of elder-berries: a flock
alighting on a bush black with ripe berries will clear the bunches in
a very short time. Haws, or peggles, which often quite cover the
hawthorn bushes, are not so general a food as the fruit of the briar.
Hips are preferred; at least, the fruit of the briar is the first of
the two to disappear. The hip is pecked open (by thrushes, redwings,
and blackbirds) at the tip, the seeds extracted, and the part where it
is attached to the stalk left, just as if the contents had been sucked
out. Greenfinches, too, will eat hips.

Haws are often left even after severe frosts; sometimes they seem to
shrivel or blacken, and may not perhaps be palatable then.
Missel-thrushes and wood-pigeons eat them. Last winter in the stress
of the sharp and continued frosts the greenfinches were driven in
December to swallow the shrivelled blackberries still on the brambles.
The fruity part of the berries was of course gone, and nothing
remained but the seeds or pips, dry and hard as wood; they were
reduced to feeding on this wretched food. Perhaps the last of the
seeds available are those of the docks.

This is well known to bird-fowlers, and on a dry day in January they
take two large bunches of docks--'red docks' they call them--tied
round the centre like faggots and well smeared at the top with
birdlime. These are placed on the ground, by a hedge, and near them a
decoy goldfinch in a cage. Goldfinches eat dock-seed, and if any
approach the decoy-bird calls. The wild bird descends from the hedge
to feed on the dock-seed and is caught. Goldfinches go in pairs all
the winter and work along the hedges together. In spring the young
green buds upon the hawthorn are called 'cuckoo's bread and cheese' by
the ploughboys.

CHAPTER IV.

HAMLET FOLK.

It happened one Sunday morning in June that a swarm of bees issued
from a hive in a cottage garden near Okebourne church. The queen at
first took u