from the birds and wasps.  Tits are often very troublesome; they peck holes in the fruit, apparently in search of the larvae of the codlin moth, leaving an opening for wasps and flies.  I find the berries of the laurel, which is a species of cherry, very attractive to blackbirds, and as long as there are any left they seem to prefer them to the apples.  In 1895 cuckoos came to the rescue of my young plum orchard; there were dozens of them at work on the nine acres at once, and they must have cleared away an immense number of the grubs.

The most remarkable season we have had since I left Aldington was the great drought of 1911.  There was no rain here worth mention from June 22, the Coronation of King George V., until August 30, and the pastures on this thin land were burnt up.  On August 30 we had some friends for tennis, and we had not been playing long before a mighty cloud-burst occurred; the rain fell in torrents.  “It didn’t stop to rain, it tumbled down,” as my men used to say, and in about half an hour the lawn was a sheet of water, the ground being so hard, that it could not soak away.  It was all over in an hour, and a neighbour with a rain-gauge registered 0.66 of an inch of rain, equal to 66 tons on an acre, or 330 tons on my five acres.

One of my ambitions has always been to see a Will-o’-the-wisp, and I am still hoping; but that hot summer, had I known it at the time, they were quite common within an easy walk of my house in the New Forest.  There was some correspondence on the subject in The Observer, and the following is extracted from one of the letters: 

“As none of your correspondents seem to be aware of a comparatively recent instance, I write to say that there were enough indubitable Will-o’-the-wisps to convince the most incredulous during the extremely hot weather of July, 1911.

“From July 18 to 22 I was at Thorney Hill in the New Forest, some seven miles behind Christchurch.  Owing to the abnormal drought the bogs and bog-streams at the foot of the hill westward were all but dry; a dense mist, however, sometimes rose from them at night.  On July 19, and the three following nights, the Will-o’-the-wisps were in great form over the bog.  They were like small balls of bluish fire, which projected themselves with hops and jerks across the most inaccessible parts of the bog, starting always, so far as could be told, from where a little stagnant moisture still remained.  They moved with an erratic velocity, so to speak, appearing and reappearing at distances of several hundred yards.  There wasn’t the slightest doubt of their authenticity.

“The inhabitants of Thorney Hill, I believe, regarded these appearances with alarm, as being, though not exactly novelties, harbingers of much misfortune.  But the drought was quite bad enough, without having the Jack-o’-lanterns to accentuate it!”

This instance was the more remarkable as I have never succeeded in finding anyone, even among people who are constantly on duty in the Forest, who could testify to having seen a Will-o’-the-wisp.