Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 3 (1899).djvu/176

150 and some late apples in bloom, and the flowery meadows more sweet with the scent of clover than any I had ever noticed elsewhere. Winding valleys leading from the main one penetrate the high-lying land, their sides thickly clothed with woods of oak, elm, ash, and hazel, with alder in the bottoms by the streams, and varied by birch, rowan, beam, and the lines of spruce firs where the roads cut through the woods. The wild and winding valley of the Lesse, with its rapid river now flowing under spreading branches at the foot of wooded slopes, dashing over boulders or washing the base of some cliff, like that on which the Château Walzin is perched; now passing more peacefully through little meadows where the high ground falls back and leaves space for farms and orchards of apple, walnut, and cherry, is not easy to get about in; like all the wooded valleys and scrub-clothed heights, it abounds in Nightingales. I went to Houyet in order to walk through the Royal Forest of Ardenne (now, I believe, turned into a game preserve for the inhabitants of the hotel, once a royal palace) by the glorious road which winds with bold sweeps to the high ground at Sanzinne (about 260 metres). The forest is of oak, birch, hazel, some beech, a kind of elm, ash, and some patches of spruce. Very fine spruces line the road; the undergrowth is very thick, and there is a fair number of large trees. The forest clothes the sides of a valley rising rather steeply from a tiny stream. Where the stream widens out into ornamental water near Houyet, swarms of Edible Frogs (Rana esculenta) were holding high carnival; and on the stony banks of the road, as elsewhere, Lizards were not uncommon on the side which caught the sun. I caught one in another part of Belgium, which appeared to be a brown form of Lacerta muralis. It escaped in my garden here; and I turned up another (the green form), bought in London, to keep it company.

Some of the birds which I did not see in the district are worth remarking upon; for although I may have overlooked some of them, others are, from their habits in early June, so conspicuous, that I do not think I could have failed to detect them had they been present, or present in any but very small numbers. I failed to see the Missel-Thrush, Redstart, Lesser Whitethroat, Longtailed Tit, Nuthatch, Spotted Flycatcher, Pied Flycatcher, Gold-