A late spell of midsummer heat makes it seem as though summer indeed has lingered in the woods. With the oak-trees still heavily canopied with green leaves, the season of pheasant-shooting seems an anomaly. A varied bunch of wild flowers may be picked, many belonging to June rather than to the months of nuts and berries. Primroses bloom freely. Flowers are to be found everywhere, and cottage gardens are ablaze with Michaelmas and tall yellow daisies and dahlias; the coming of the first keen frost will mean a floral massacre. On hedges laden with blackberries and the red bryony berries there are sprays of honeysuckle, and there are many bright blooms of scabious, knapweed, corn-poppy, daisy, harebell, violet, and scarlet pimpernel. Even some of the old cock pheasants seem to imagine that April has come, judging by their spring-like crowing, and some of the hens nest who should have done with nests by the end of July. One very late nest we saw with eleven eggs, on which the hen was only beginning to sit, as shown by a broken egg. She had been cut out by the mowing of seed-clover heads, but returned to her mistaken duties, and was sitting on the evening of September 30. * * * * * Winter Sleep On a perfect summer-like day of autumn, it is strange to think that hedgehogs are going to their winter quarters, and that sleep is overtaking so many creatures--bats that hang amid the dark rafters of the barn roofs; toads in the mud of the ponds; field-mice, water-voles, lizards, badgers, squirrels, hedgehogs curled in the ditches, snugly rolled up in a great ball of dry grass and leaves; and the dormouse, "seven sleeper," as it is called locally, or "dorymouse," "sleeper," or "sleeping-mouse." Much country weather-lore, in all parts of the world, is based on the storing of nuts by squirrels, the building of winter houses by musk-rats, the early or late cutting of winter supplies of wood by beavers, the working of moles, who are supposed before winter comes to prepare basins for the storage of worms, and the laying up of food on the part of bears. "The hedgehog," said the writer of "Husbandman's Practice," "commonly hath two holes or vents in his den or cave, the one toward the south and the other toward the north, and look which of them he stops; thence will come great storms and winds follow." The badger in his winter retreat certainly will block up holes from which draughts blow. * * * * * A Dish of Hedgehog