They had a song for everything, the mill song, the reapers' song, just as in Somerset, the apple country, they still have a cider song, or perhaps, rather, an orchard song. Such rhymes might well be chanted about the hay and the wheat, or at the coming of the green leaf, or the yellowing of the acorns, when the cawing of the rooks is incessant, a kind of autumn festival. It seems so natural that the events of the year should be met with a song. But somehow a very hard and unobservant spirit has got abroad into our rural life, and people do not note things as the old folk did. They do not mark the coming of the swallows, nor any of the dates that make the woodland almanack. It is a pity that there should be such indifference--that the harsh ways of the modern town should press so heavily on the country. This summer, too, there seems a marked absence of bees, butterflies, and other insects in the fields. One bee will come along, calling at every head of white clover. By-and-by you may see one more calling at the heathbells, and nothing else, as in each journey they visit only the flower with which they began. Then there will be quite an interval before a third bee is seen, and a fourth may be found dead perhaps on the path, besides which you may not notice any more. For a whole hour you may not observe a humble-bee, and the wasp-like hover-flies, that are generally past all thought of counting, are scarcely seen. A blue butterfly we found in the dust of the road, without the spirit to fly, and lifted him into a field to let him have a chance of life; a few tortoiseshells, and so on--even the white butterflies are quite uncommon, the whites that used to drift along like snowflakes. Where are they all? Did the snow kill them? Is there any connection between the absence of insects and the absence of swallows? If so, how did the swallows know beforehand, without coming, that there were no insects for them? Yet the midsummer hum, the deep humming sound in the atmosphere above, has been loud and persistent over the hayfields, so that there must have been the usual myriads of the insects that cause this sound. While I was thinking in this way a swallow alighted on the turf, picked up a small white moth from among the short grass, and went off with it. In gloomy overcast weather the swallows at the sea-side frequently alight on the pebbles of the beach to pick up the insects which will not rise and fly. Some beaches and sandbanks are much frequented by insects, and black clouds of them sometimes come drifting along, striking the face like small hail.