birds getting killed. Chaffinches are like the children in
village streets--they will not get out of your way; by and by
in rural places the merciful man will have to ring his bell
almost incessantly to avoid running over them. As I do not
travel at a furious speed I manage to avoid most things, even
the wandering loveless oil-beetle and the small rose-beetle
and that slow-moving insect tortoise the tumbledung. Two or
three seasons ago I was so unfortunate as to run over a large
and beautifully bright grass snake near Aldermaston, once a
snake sanctuary. He writhed and wriggled on the road as if I
had broken his back, but on picking him up I was pleased to
find that my wind-inflated rubber tyre had not, like the
brazen chariot wheel, crushed his delicate vertebra; he
quickly recovered, and when released glided swiftly and easily
away into cover. Twice only have I deliberately tried to run
down, to tread on coat-tails so to speak, of any wild
creature. One was a weasel, the other a stoat, running along
at a hedge-side before me. In both instances, just as the
front wheel was touching the tail, the little flat-headed
rascal swerved quickly aside and escaped.

Even some of the less common and less tame birds care as
little for a man on a bicycle as they do for a cow. Not long
ago a peewit trotted leisurely across the road not more than
ten yards from my front wheel; and on the same day I came upon
a green woodpecker enjoying a dust-bath in the public road.
He declined to stir until I stopped to watch him, then merely
flew about a dozen yards away and attached himself to the
trunk of a fir tree at the roadside and waited there for me to
go. Never in all my wanderings afoot had I seen a yaffingale