This grand tier was crowded with owls—­not arranged in any order, but haphazard, causing a fine mixture of colour.  Clearly this gallery was constantly renewed.  The white owl gave the prevalent tint, side by side with the brown wood owls, and scattered among the rest, a few long horned owls—­a mingling of white, yellowish brown, and tawny feathers.  Though numerous here, yet trap and gun have so reduced the wood owls that you may listen half the night by a cover and never hear the ‘Who-hoo’ that seems to demand your name.

The barn owls are more liable to be shot, because they are more conspicuous; but, on the other hand, as they often breed and reside away from covers, they seem to escape.  For months past one of these has sailed by my window every evening uttering a hissing ‘skir-r-r.’  Here, some were nailed with their backs to the wall, that they might not hide their guilty faces.

The delicate texture of the owl’s feathers is very remarkable:  these birds remind me of a huge moth.  The owls were more showy than the hawks, though it is commonly said that without sunlight there is no colour—­as in the case of plants grown in darkness.  Yet the hawks are day birds, while the owls fly by night.  There came the sound of footsteps; and I retreated, casting one glance backward at the black and white, the blue and brown colours that streaked the wall, while the dull green weasels were in perpetual shadow.  By night the bats would flit round and about that gloomy place.  It would not do to return by the same path, lest another keeper might be coming up it; so I stepped into the wood itself.  To those who walk only in the roads, hawks and owls seem almost rare.  But a wood is a place to which they all flock; and any wanderer from the north or west naturally tends thither.  This wood is of large extent; but even to the smaller plantations of the Downs it is wonderful what a number come in the course of a year.  Besides the shed just visited, there would be certain to be another more or less ornamented near the keeper’s cottage, and probably others scattered about, where the commoner vermin could be nailed without the trouble of carrying them far away.  Only the owls and hawks, magpies, and such more striking evidences of slaughter were collected here, and almost daily renewed.

To get into the wood was much easier than to get out, on account of the thick hedge, palings, and high sharp-sparred gates; but I found a dry ditch where it was possible to creep under the bushes into a meadow where was a footpath.

CHAPTER VI

LURCHER-LAND:  ‘THE PARK’

The time of the apple-bloom is the most delicious season in Sarsen village.  It is scarcely possible to obtain a view of the place, although it is built on the last slope of the Downs, because just where the ground drops and the eye expects an open space, plantations of fir and the tops of tall poplars and elms intercept the glance.  In ascending from the level meadows of the vale thick double mounds, heavily timbered with elm, hide the houses until you are actually in their midst.