The moon floated in the nightpool with the Swan, the distant roar of the surf floated from over the clover fields, and still I lay there, one with the Maker of Life ... a white mistiness flapped in front, beating broad pinions as it hovered, it dropped to the earth, and a shrill scream trembled into the night. Fluttering like a moth, the ghostly barn owl struggled with the rat, held it in a remorseless clutch of powerful talons. Into the wheatfield the rat had come, urged by instinct to seek the means of life, and it had found only death. Dreamily the owl fanned the night with his broad wings and then floated away to his nest in the loft of the cottage near the church. Saddened by the consciousness of life’s tragedy--every form of life depending for existence on the death of another form--I walked towards the village, while a landrail began his jarring _crake-crake_ in the corn, and little moths went down to drink the honey of the night-opening flowers, living their short life while the moon, soon to die, was in its fullest beauty. Antares was a dull red ember in the south: the star of summer that Richard Jefferies loved. My thought was with him--he was near me, though the body had long been lying in Broadwater. Had he spoken to me in this mystic June night, I wondered; and then a blackcap warbler sang in a thorn bush; my thought was as old as its song, and I doubted no longer. A FEATHERED WASTER No bird-lovers can but desire the destruction of the Little Owl (_Athene Noctua_), a prolific bird introduced into England half a century ago by Lord Lilford. It has no redeeming trait. I have watched several pairs, and my observations show without doubt that he is not worth his salt, and deserves not the slightest mercy. Old Bob, a keeper with whom I am very friendly, showed me a pollard oak standing at the side of a hazel covert, which he suspected as the home of a pair of these birds. I sat down in the dry ditch and waited, while the humble bees swung themselves among the flowering nettles. This was in the early afternoon, and not in the evening or the night; in the bright sunlight, when all self-respecting owls are dreaming in barn-loft or hollow tree. But to the Little Owl time is obviously money, for it was not long before a brown bird, not unlike a large thrush, fluttered out of the tree and flew to a may hedge running at right angles to the covert. A large white cabbage butterfly drifted past, and was captured dexterously by the alien. Now cabbage butterflies are a distinct pest, so one good mark was registered to the accused. Shortly he descended into the sapling corn, probably to take a beetle or mouse, and as these are not yet valuable as human food he was given another good mark.