To many this may seem a wearisomely trite point of view, affecting a grievance as old as the hills, and even less likely of obliteration. But though the point of view is ancient enough, the grievance is no longer so. Of late years the ranks of village dwellers have been very largely reinforced from the classes who care little for sport and a great deal for all other allurements of the country-side. Rural England is no longer peopled by sportsmen and the dependents of sportsmen; but, slowly and surely, a majority is creeping up in the villages, composed of men and women both knowing and loving Nature, and to whom the old-time local policy of endurance under deprivation of rights for expediency’s sake, is an incomprehensible, as well as an intolerable thing. All the vast-winged, beautiful marauders of the air that I love to watch, are ruthlessly shot down by the gamekeepers on a suspicion presumptive and unproved; but the fox that, in a single night, massacres every bird in the villager’s hen-roost, must go scatheless because poor profit may not be set before rich pastime. One day, almost the hottest so far, I was out in the meadows, and came upon a curious thing. The path, or rather green lane, ran between high hedges. On either hand there was a great field of flowering crops, the one red clover, the other sainfoin. There must have been twenty or thirty acres of each stretching away under the tense still air and light, much of a colour, but the sainfoin of a softer, purer pink. Both fields seemed alike attractive to the bees; but while, to the right, the sainfoin gave out a mighty note of organ music, the red clover on my left was utterly silent. Looking through a gap in the foliage, I could not see there a single butterfly or bee. The truth, of course, was that the nectar in the trumpet-petals of the clover was too far down for the honey-bee to reach; nor would even the bumble-bees trouble about it, with a whole province of sainfoin hard by, over-brimming with choicer, more attainable sweets.