There is silence in the woods—­the drowsy silence of summer.  Most of the birds have gone to the cornfields.  An ash copse is never so full of birds as the denser woodlands, where the oaks grow stronger on a stiff clay soil.  Here are no laughing yaffels, no cruel, murderous shrikes, and very few song-birds.  Still, there are always the pigeons and the cushats, the wicked magpies and the screaming “jaypies,” as the local people call the jays.  Then, too, there are the birds down among the watercress and the brooklime in the clear pool below the spring, moorhens occasionally awakening the echoes by running down a weird chromatic scale or calling with their loud and mellow note to their friends and relations over at the brook; here, too, the softer croak of the mallard and the wild duck is also heard.  A hawk, chasing some smaller bird, is darting and hovering over the tops of the firs, but, catching a glimpse of me, disappears from sight.  Presently a little bird, with an eye keener even than the cruel hawk’s, comes out from the hazels and perches on a post some ten yards away.  It is a fly-catcher.  As he sits he turns his eyes in every direction, on the look-out for dainty insects.  He seems to have eyes at the back of his head, for instantly he sees a fly in the air right behind him, makes a dash, catches it, and flies on to the next post.  He repeats the performance there, then once more changes his ground.  When he has made another successful raid, he returns to his first post, always hunting in a chosen circuit, and always catching flies.  He was here yesterday, and will be here again to-morrow.  When you try to approach him, however, he flies away and hides himself in the firs.

If there are not many birds in the woods just now, still, there is always the beauty of the trees.  How marvellous is the symmetry of form and colouring in the trunk and branches of a big ash tree!  If you put mercury into a solution of nitrate of silver, and leave them for a few days to combine, the result will be a precipitation of silver in a lovely arborescent form, the arbor Dianae, beautiful beyond description.  Such are my favourite ash trees when the summer sunshine sparkles on them.  It is their bare, silvered trunks that give the special charm to these hanging woods.  They stand out from dark recesses filled with alder and beech and ivy-mantled firs, rising in bold but graceful outline; columns of silver, touched here and there with the sad gold and green shades of lichen and moss.  The moss that mingles with golden lichens is of a soft, velvety hue, like a mantle of half drapery on a beautiful white statue.  And, oddly enough, though ferns do not grow on the limestone soil of the Cotswolds, yet on the first story so to speak of every big ash tree by the river, as well as on the pollard willows, there is a beautiful little fernery springing up out of the moss and lichen, which seems to thrive most when the lichen thrives—­in the winter rather than in the summer.  Then, too,