Things went very quietly and peacefully during the early part of that summer. There were no human intruders whatever. As I found out afterwards, the new people at the Hall had stopped all the old footpaths, including the field-path which led to the coppice gate. They had great ideas on the subject of high-farming and high-preserving, but for the present we luckily lived in comparative ignorance of these. One or two things certainly seemed strange. Almost all the hedges in the neighbourhood had been cut down and pleached during the winter, making the country-side look singularly bare. Also several grass fields had been ploughed up and planted with roots or wheat. The ginger-haired keeper and a boy—his son, I believe—were often in the coppice, messing about among the undergrowth and collecting whole baskets full of pheasants’ eggs. Mother was horrified at this performance, but, as we found out later, they took them to the Hall to be hatched in incubators. I have spoken of the amount of timber-cutting which went on around the Hall. One day in the early spring a number of men invaded the coppice and cut away the underbrush and tree branches, so as to make several open rides across the wood from end to end. We were annoyed to see so many good hazel-bushes destroyed, but as they did not cut down the heavy timber we were not particularly inconvenienced. We owed that ginger-whiskered keeper a debt of gratitude for slaying our enemy, the grey cat, but some of his performances no self-respecting coppice-dweller could approve of. He began to set horrible gins and snares in every direction. So far as killing off the stoats and weasels went, this was all very well; but it was a sad and dreadful thing to see an unlucky brown owl, the foe of nothing except mice and such-like vermin, struggling miserably half the night in the foul jaws of a pole-trap, with both its legs broken. Jays and magpies suffered also. I had seen traps at the Hall, and took particular pains to point them out to my youngsters as objects to be avoided with the utmost care. Other young families were not so fortunate. One of Rusty’s promising sons was missed one day, and found by his mother with his head crushed between cruel iron teeth, stone dead. There is nothing in the world so barbarous as the steel-spring trap. That spring and all the early summer were extraordinarily dry. The hay-crop was very short, but of excellent quality, while the grain was curiously dwarfed. Many of the flowers came out before their time, particularly the white convolvulus and the purple scabious. The brook in the field, I remember, ran altogether dry, and failed to fill a large excavation which the new tenant of the Hall had had dug with the intention of making a fish-pond. I went to look at it one day, and found it a bare expanse of red clay, netted all over with deep cracks, in the largest and dampest of which a few small, unhappy frogs had found precarious refuge.