There Is A Good Deal Of
General Truth In This Observation; Certainly We Seem To Have Lost Our
Springs.
I do not think I have heard it thunder this year up to the time
of writing.
The absence of electrical disturbance shows a peculiar state
of atmosphere unfavourable to growth, so that the corn will not hide a
partridge, and in some places hardly a sparrow. Where did the painters
get their green leaves from this year in time for the galleries? Not from
the trees, for they had none.
A flock of rooks was waddling about in a thinly grown field of corn which
scarcely hid their feet, and a number of swallows, flying very low,
scarcely higher than the rooks' breasts, wound in and out among them. The
day was cloudy and cold, and probably the insects had settled on the
ground. The rooks' feet stirred them up, and as they rose they were taken
by the swallows. All over the field there were no other swallows, nor in
the adjacent fields, only in that one spot where the rooks were feeding.
On another occasion swallows flying low over a closely cropped grass
field alighted on the sward to try and catch their prey. There seems a
scarcity of some kinds of insect life, due doubtless to the wind. Out of
a dozen butterfly chrysalids collected, six were worthless; they were
stiff, and when opened were stuffed full of small white larvae, which had
eaten away the coming butterfly in its shell.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 257 of 394
Words from 69008 to 69261
of 105669
