We need not grumble at our contemporaries, however, for not being so fine as William John McNabb.  To children, for all we know, the world may still seem to be full of people who laugh because they are happy and smile because they are kind.  The world will always remain to a child the chief of toys, and the hum of insects as enchanting as the hum of a musical top.  Even those of us who are grown up can recover this enchantment, not only through the pleasures of memory but through the endless pleasures of watching the things that inhabit the earth.  The world is always waiting to be discovered in full, and yet no life is long enough to discover the whole of a single county, or even the whole of a single parish.  Who alive, for instance, knows all the moles of Sussex?  I confess I got my first sight of one a few days ago, and, though I had seen dead moles hanging from trees and had read descriptions of moles, the living creature was as unexpected as if one had come on it silent upon a peak in Darien.  I had never expected it to look so black and glossy in the midday sun or to have that little pink snout that made me think of it as a small underground pig.  I had always been told, too, that the sound of a footstep would frighten a mole, but this mole only began to show fright at the sound of voices.  Then it began to tear its way into the undergrowth with paws and snout ever trying to overtake each other.  Mr Blunden has described how

     The lost mole tries to pierce the mattocked clay
     In agony and terror of the sun.

I got much the same impression of agony and terror as this poor creature dug its way into the grass and ferns and, coming out at the far end of the clump, bolted under a tree like a frightened pig.  And yet, they say, this poor little coward is a fierce animal enough.  He is, we are told, impelled by so cruel a hunger that he would die of it were it to go unsatisfied for even twenty-four hours.  If he can find nothing else to eat, he will kill and eat a fellow-mole.  So the authorities tell us, but I wonder how many of the authorities have even seen a mole in the very act of cannibalism.  How many of them have followed him on his long journeys through the bowels of the earth?  He certainly looked no South Sea monster on the Sunday morning on which for a few seconds I watched him.  Nor would John Clare have written affectionately about him had he been entirely bloody-minded.

Then there was the hedgehog.  The charm of hedgehogs is that we do not see them every day—­that their appearance is a secret and an accident.  They are a part of the busy life that goes on all about us as mysteriously as the movements of spirits.  Consequently, when I was looking over a sloping field the other evening and, hearing a crackling as of sticks being trodden on, turned my eyes and saw a living creature making its way out of a wood into the grass, I was delighted to find that it was a hedgehog and not a man or a rat.  I could see it only dimly