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THE MOLE-CRICKET.

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particularly in its thorax and fore-legs. The former is a very hard and solid shell or crust, covering like a shield the trunk of the animal; and the latter are uncommonly fitted for burrowing, both by their strength and construction. The shanks are very broad, and terminate obliquely in four enormous sharp teeth, like so many fingers; the foot consists of three joints, the two first being broad and tooth-shaped, and pointing in an opposite direction to the teeth of the shank; and the last small, and armed at the extremity with two short claws. This foot is placed inside the shank, so as to resemble a thumb, and perform the office of one. The direction and motion of these hands, as in moles, is outwards; thus enabling the animal most effectually to remove the earth when it burrows. By the help of these powerful instruments, it is astonishing how instantaneously it buries itself. This creature works underground, like a field-mouse, raising a ridge as it goes; but it does not throw up heaps like its namesake the mole. They will in this manner undermine whole gardens; and thus in wet and swampy situations, in which they delight, they excavate their curious apartments."

The Rev. Gilbert White also thus describes this insect: "As mole-crickets often infest gardens by the sides of canals, they are unwelcome guests to the gardener, raising up ridges in their subterraneous progress, and rendering the walks unsightly. If they take to the kitchen quarters, they occasion great damage among the plants and roots, by destroying whole beds of cabbages, young legumes, and flowers. When dug out they seem very slow and helpless, and make no use of their wings by day; but at night they come abroad and make long excursions, as I have been convinced by finding stragglers in a morning in improbable places. In fine weather, about the middle of April, and just at the close of day, they begin to solace themselves with a low, dull jarring note, continued for a long time without interruption, and not unlike the chattering of the fern-owl, or goat-sucker, but more inward.

"About the beginning of May they lay their eggs, as I was once an eye-witness; for a gardener, at a house where I was on a visit, happening to be mowing on the sixth of that month by the side of a canal, his scythe struck too

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deep, pared off a large piece of turf, and laid open to view a curious scene of domestic economy.

"There were many caverns and winding passages leading to a kind of chamber, neatly smoothed and rounded, and about the size of a modern snuff-box. Within this secret nursery were deposited nearly a hundred eggs of a dirty yellow colour, and enveloped in a tough skin, but too lately exuded to contain any rudiments of young, being full of a viscous substance. The eggs lay but shallow, and within the influence of the sun, just under a little heap of freshly moved mould, like that which is raised by ants.

"When mole-crickets fly, they move cursu undoso, rising and falling in curves, like the other species mentioned before. In different parts of this kingdom people call them fen-crickets, churr-worms, and eve-churrs, all very apposite

names.

"Anatomists, who have examined the intestines of these insects, say, that, from the structure, position, and number of their stomachs, or maws, there seems to be good reason to suppose that this and the two former species ruminate or chew the cud like many quadrupeds."

THE WOOD, IN APRIL.

Let us accompany Miss Mitford, the best guide we can have in such an excursion, into a spring wood. "Spring," she says, "is actually come, with the fulness and almost the suddenness of a northern summer. To-day is completely April; clouds and sunshine, wind and showers; blossoms on the trees, grass in the fields, swallows by the ponds, snakes in the hedgerows, nightingales in the thickets, and cuckoos everywhere." We are on our way to a wood called the Penge; we proceed on our way through winding lanes, between hedgerows tenderly green, till we reach the hatchgate, with the white cottage beside it embosomed in fruit trees, which form the entrance to the Penge, and in a moment the whole scene is before our eyes. "A

"Is it not beautiful ?" demands our cheerful guide.

WOODS IN APRIL.

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wood is generally a very pretty place; but this wood.Imagine a small forest, full of glades and sheep-walks, surrounded by irregular cottages with their blooming orchards, a clear stream winding about the brakes, and a road intersecting it, and giving life and light to the picture, and you will have a faint idea of the Penge. Every step was opening a new point of view, a fresh combination of glade, and path, and thicket. The accessories, too, were changing every moment. Ducks, geese, pigs, and children, giving way, as we advanced into the wood, to sheep and forest ponies; and they again disappearing as we became more entangled in its mazes, till we heard nothing but the song of the nightingale, and saw only the silent flowers.

"What a piece of fairy land! The tall elms over-head bursting into tender vivid leaf, with here and there a hoary oak or a silver-barked larch; every twig swelling with the brown buds, and yet not quite stripped of the tawny foliage of autumn; tall hollies and hawthorn beneath, with their crisp, brilliant leaves mixed with the white blossoms of the sloe, and woven together with garlands of woodbines and wild briars ;-what a fairy-land!

"Primroses, cowslips, pansies, and the regular, open-eyed white blossom of the wood anemone, or windflower, were set under our feet as thick as daisies in a meadow. And look, there is the wood-sorrel: look at the pendant white flower, shaped like a snowdrop, and veined with purple streaks, and with beautiful trefoil leaves folded like a heart-some, the young ones, so vividly yet tenderly green, that the foliage of the elm and the hawthorn would show dully at their side; others of a deeper tint, and lined, as it were, with a rich and changeful purple. See how beautiful they are, and in what profusion! See how the dark shade of the holly sets off the light and delicate colouring of the flower! And see that other bed of them springing from the rich moss in the roots of that old beech tree!"

FELLING TIMBER.-Let us accompany Miss Mitford still farther. "We had nearly threaded the wood," says she, "and were approaching an open grove of magnificent oaks on the other side, when sounds, other than of nightingales, burst on our ear, the deep and frequent strokes of the woodman's axe; and emerging from the Penge we

discovered the havoc which that axe had committed. Above twenty of the finest trees lay stretched on the velvet turf. There they lay in every shape and form of devastation; some, bare trunks, stripped ready for the timber-carriage, with the bark built up in long piles at the side; some with the spoilers busy about them, stripping, hacking, hewing; others with their noble branches, their brown and fragrant shoots all fresh as if they were alive-majestic corpses, the slain of to-day; The grove was like a field of battle. The young lads who were stripping the bark, the very children who were picking up the chips seemed awed and silent, as if conscious that death was around them. The nightingales sang, faintly and interruptedly, a few low frightened notes like a requiem.

"Ah! here we are at the very scene of murder; the very tree that they are felling; they have just hewn round the trunk with those slaughtering axes, and are about to saw it asunder. After all it is a fine and thrilling operation. Into how grand an attitude was that young man thrown as he gave the final strokes round the root; and how wonderful is the effect of that supple and apparently powerless saw, bending like a riband and yet overmastering that giant of the woods, conquering and overthrowing that thing of life! Now it has passed half through the trunk, and the woodman has begun to calculate which way the tree will fall; he drives a wedge to direct its course; now a few more movements of the noiseless saw; and then a larger wedge. See how the branches tremble! Hark how the trunk begins to crack. Another stroke of the huge hammer on the wedge, and the tree quivers, as with a mortal agony-shakes, reels, and falls. How slow, and solemn, and awful it is! How like to human death, in its commonly esteemed heroic form! Cæsar in the Capitol, Seneca in the bath, could not fall more sublimely than that oak.

"Even the heavens seem to sympathise with the devastation. The clouds have gathered into one thick low canopy, dark and vapouring as the smoke which overhangs London the setting sun is just gleaming underneath with a dim and bloody glare, and the crimson rays spreading upwards with a lurid and portentous grandeur, a subdued and dusky glow,

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FELLING TIMBER.

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like the light reflected on the sky from some vast conflagration. The deep flush fades away, and the rain begins to descend, and we hurry homeward talking only of the fallen tree."

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