Thus wrote Shakespeare of bold chanticleer; and perhaps the rooks when they are grieving for their lost ones, hold solemn requiem until the morning light and the cheering rays of the sun make them forget their woes.

It is difficult to understand what pleasure the farmers find in shooting young rooks with twelve-bore guns.  Ours are always allowed a grand battue in the garden every year.  They ask their friends out from Cirencester to assist.  For an hour or so the shots have been rattling all round the house and on the sheds in the stable-yard.  The horses are frightened out of their wits.  Grown-up men ought to know better than to keep firing continually towards a house not two hundred yards away.  A stray pellet might easily blind a man or a horse.

Farmers are sometimes very careless with their guns.  Out partridge-shooting one is in mortal terror of the man on one’s right, who invariably carries his gun at such a level that if it went off it would “rake” the whole line.  If you tell one of these gentry that he is holding his gun in a dangerous way, he will only laugh, remarking possibly that you are getting very nervous.  The best plan is not to ask these well-meaning, but highly dangerous fellows to shoot with you.  Unfortunately it is probably the eldest son of the principal tenant on the manor who is the culprit.  The best plan in such cases is to speak to the old man firmly, but courteously, asking him to try to dissuade his son from his dangerous practices.

It is amusing to watch the jackdaws when they come from the ivy-mantled fir trees to steal the food we throw every morning on to the lawn in front of the house for the pheasants, the pigeons, and other birds.  They are the funniest rascals and the biggest thieves in Christendom.  Alighting suddenly behind a cock pheasant, they snatch the food from him just as he imagines he has got it safely; and terribly astonished he always looks.  Then these greedy daws will chase the smaller birds as they fly away with any dainty morsel, and compel them to give it up.  A curiously mixed group assembles on the lawn each morning at eight o’clock in the winter.  First of all there are the pheasants crowing loudly for their breakfast, then come the stately swans, several pinioned wild ducks, tame pigeons and wild and timid stock doves, four or five moorhens, any number of daws, as well as thrushes, blackbirds, starlings, house-sparrows, and finches.  One day, having forgotten to feed them, I was astonished at hearing loud quacks proceeding from the dining-room, and was horrified to find that the ducks had come into the house to look for me and demand their grub.

Foxes give one a good deal of anxiety in May and June, when the cubs are about half grown.  On arriving home to-day the first news I hear is that two dead cubs have been picked up:  “one looks as if his head had been battered in, and the other appears to have been worried by a dog.”  This is the only information I can get from the keeper.  It is really a serious blow; for if two have been found dead, how many others may not have died in their earth or in the woods?