The brown field-mouse may be found in the orchard hedge, but is so unobtrusive that his presence is hardly observed. There are many more of these mice in the hedges than are suspected to be there; their little bodies slip about so near the surface of the brown earth, the colour of which they resemble, that few notice them unless they chance to be calling each other in their shrill treble. Even then, though the sound be audible, the mouse is invisible; but you cannot sit quiet in a hedge very long in summer without becoming aware of their presence. Some of the older branches of the hawthorn bushes, bent down when young by the hedge-cutter, are nearly horizontal and free for some part of their length of twigs. The mice run along these natural bridges from one part of the hedge to the other. Last spring I watched a mouse very busily engaged sitting on such a branch, about a foot above the bank, nibbling the tender top leaves of the `clite' plant. The `clite' grows with great rapidity, and climbs up into the hedge; this plant had already pushed up ten or twelve inches, so that the mouse on the branch was just about on a level with the upper and tenderest leaves. These he drew towards him with his fore feet and complacently nibbled. When he had picked out what suited his fancy he ran along the branch, and in an instant was lost to sight on the bank among the grass. The nests of the `harvest trow'--a still smaller mouse, seldom seen except in summer--are common in the grass of the orchard (and in almost every meadow) before it is mown. As the summer wanes their dead bodies are frequently found in the footpaths; for a kind of epizoic seems to seize them at that time, and they die in numbers. It is curious that an animal which carefully conceals itself in health should at the approach of death seek an open and exposed place like a footpath worn clear of grass. In the ha-ha wall, at that part of the orchard where the highway hedge comes up, is the square mouth of a rather large drain. The drain itself is of rude construction--two stones on edge and a third across at the top. It comes from the cowyard, passing under the outermost part of the garden a considerable distance away from the house. Very early one morning the labourers, coming to work, saw a fox slip into the mouth of the drain through the long grass of the meadow on which it opened. In the summer, the cattle being all out in the fields, the drain was perfectly dry, and it was known that now and then the rabbits from the hedge made use of it as a temporary place of concealment. No doubt the presence of a rabbit in it was the cause of the fox entering in the first place. The rabbit must have had a very bad time of it for, the drain being closed at the other end with an iron grating, no possibility of escape existed.