The migrant birds had all left long ago, and the woods were quieter than of old. Not that there was not plenty of life remaining. The wood-pigeons still pecked among the beech leaves for mast; great tits and tomtits moved restlessly among the branches of our beech; flights of long-tail tits talked softly in the tops of the evergreens. Finches of many kinds—greenfinch, chaffinch, bullfinch, and even a few hawfinches, feasted on the hawthorn berries which hung thickly on the bare hedges, and began to take their toll of the fast-reddening holly. The privet and mountain-ash berries were gone long ago. These form the pet dessert of bird life, and are always cleaned up almost before they are ripe. So, too, was the sticky scarlet fruit of three gnarled old yews which stood in a little group all by themselves just beyond the rabbit-warren where the ground sloped towards the brook. Thrushes and blackbirds still visited their’ dark recesses, but more from habit than for any other reason. Redwings and fieldfares fed in small flocks across the open ground, and shared with the starlings and rooks the insect food of which they are so fond. The grass, no longer green but browned at the tips by frost and sodden from lack of sun, had ceased to grow, and feed was becoming short. I noticed that the cattle had taken to the higher ground instead of feeding along the brook; and that in the mornings when the frost-dew hung thick on the meadows, they wandered along the hedgerows, picking drier mouthfuls from the bank. Some of our acquaintances had already retired for the winter. The hedgehogs were no longer to be seen making leisurely progress along the hedge-banks; they had all gone to sleep deep in leaf-lined crevices under the blackthorn roots; the dormice had followed their example, and curled themselves up for the winter in their delicately woven globes of grass and fibre. Mr. Dormouse is a heavier sleeper than we are, yet not above rousing for a square meal if the sun comes out warm and bright on a January morning. Snakes, slow-worms and lizards had all disappeared long ago, and would not move again for more than four months. I had not seen a bat for a fortnight, and I fancy the last of them had joined his comrades hung up in the church-tower or in Farmer Martin’s thatched barn, stiff and motionless like dead game in the Hall larder. Field-mice showed when the sun came out, dodging about on the surface of the dead leaves, apparently very busy, and yet never appearing to accomplish anything in particular. But they would soon follow most of the four-legged denizens of the coppice into winter-quarters, and leave the bare woods to the birds, the rabbits, and the cunning, hungry fox.