Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/136

98 grouse crowed. The skylark and titlark, birds which were there thirty years before, had altered their habits, adapting themselves to changed conditions; they, perhaps, were the sole survivors of the old avifauna. Corn and roots had not only replaced ling and bilberry, but dock, goosefoot, and nettle had vanished; the tip was a tip no longer.

In the centre of the great cultivated area we met a bread van, and by the side of the track, where some of the latest rubbish had been dumped, noted the remnants of a bound magazine. A plough was cutting straight furrows through the rich earth, and every yard it turned up fragments of crockery; in years to come will archæologists collect and piece together some of these fragments to study the ceramic art of the twentieth century? Will they write learned papers on the strange habits of an ancient civilisation which scattered its glass and china broadcast? Or will they talk more correctly of these municipal "kitchen middens"?

There has been less change during these last few years, the decade nearing completion; the hedges are denser and higher, the fields yield better results under crop rotation; the flagging city trees, after a spell in pots in the smoky air, recruit in the nurseries; the motor van and lorry cross unquaking roads, the tractor furrows rich soil. The waste land is perfectly reclaimed.

Is it purely sentimental to regret the change? Near forty years have passed since those happy, careless days of boyhood, and now,

did we really appreciate the beauty of the moor, or has