Immense ant-hills are often depicted in the illustrations to tropical travels, but this great pile, which certainly contained more than a cartload, was within a few miles of Hyde Park Corner. From nests like this large quantities of eggs are obtained for feeding the partridges hatched from the eggs collected by mowers and purchased by keepers. Part of the nest being laid bare with any tool, the eggs are hastily taken out in masses and thrown into a sack. Some think that ant's eggs, although so favourite a food, are not always the most advantageous. Birds which have been fed freely on these eggs become fastidious, and do not care for much else, so that if the supply fails they fall off in condition. If there are sufficient eggs to last the season, then a few every day produce the best effect; if not they had better not have a feast followed by a fast. The sense of having a roof overhead is felt in walking through a forest of firs like this, because the branches are all at the top of the trunks. The stems rise to the same height, and then the dark foliage spreading forms a roof. As they are not very near together the eye can see some distance between them, and as there is hardly any underwood or bushes--nothing higher than the fern--there is a space open and unfilled between the ground and the roof so far above. A vast hollow extends on every side, nor is it broken by the flitting of birds or the rush of animals among the fern. The sudden note of a wood-pigeon, hoarse and deep, calling from a fir-top, sounds still louder and ruder in the spacious echoing vault beneath, so loud as at first to resemble the baying of a hound. The call ceases, and another of these watch-dogs of the woods takes it up afar off. There is an opening in the monotonous firs by some rising ground, and the sunshine falls on young Spanish chestnuts and underwood, through which is a little-used footpath. If firs are planted in wildernesses with the view of ultimately covering the barren soil with fertile earth, formed by the decay of vegetable matter, it is, perhaps, open to discussion as to whether the best tree has been chosen. Under firs the ground is generally dry, too dry for decay; the resinous emanations rather tend to preserve anything that falls there.