Two More Nuts Were
Found On The Same Bank, Bored By The Same Carpenter.
The holes looked as
if he had turned the nut round and round as he gnawed.
Unless the nut had
shrunk, the hole was not large enough to pull the kernel out all at once;
it must have been eaten little by little in many mouthfuls. The same
amount of nibbling would have sawn a circle round the nut, and so,
dividing the shell in two, would have let the kernel out bodily - a plan
more to our fancy; but the mouse is a nibbler, and he preferred to
nibble, nibble, nibble. Hard by one afternoon, as the cows were lazily
swishing their tails coming home to milking, and the shadow of the thick
hedge had already caused the anemones in the grass to close their petals,
there was a slight rustling sound. Out into the cool grass by some
cowslips there came a small dark head. It was an adder, verily a snake in
the grass and flowers. His quick eye - you know the proverb, 'If his ear
were as quick as his eye, No man should pass him by' - caught sight of us
immediately, and he turned back. The hedge was hollow there, and the
mound grown over with close-laid, narrow-leaved ivy. The viper did not
sink in these leaves, but slid with a rustling sound fully exposed above
them. His grey length and the chain of black diamond spots down his back,
his flat head with deadly tooth, did not harmonise as the green snake
does with leaf and grass. He was too marked, too prominent - a venomous
foreign thing, fit for tropic sands and nothing English or native to our
wilds. He seemed like a reptile that had escaped from the glass case of
some collection.
The green snake or grass snake, with yellow-marked head, fits in
perfectly with the floating herbage of the watery places he frequents.
The eye soon grows accustomed to his curves, till he is no more startling
than a frog among the water-crowfoot you are about to gather. To the
adder the mind never becomes habituated; he ever remains repellent. This
adder was close to a house and cowshed, and, indeed, they seem to like to
be near cows. Since then a large silvery slowworm was killed just
there - a great pity, for they are perfectly harmless. We saw, too, a very
large lizard under the heath. Three little effets (efts) ran into one
hole on the bank yesterday. Some of the men in spring went off into the
woods to 'flawing,' - i.e. - to barking the oak which is thrown in May - the
bark is often used now for decoration, like the Spanish cork bark. Some
were talking already of the 'grit' work and looking forward to it, that
is, to mowing and haymaking, which mean better wages. The farmers were
grumbling that their oats were cuckoo oats, not sown till the cuckoo
cried, and not likely to come to much.
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