Sun, bright, & pleasant. A gardener in this village has lately cut several large cauliflowers, growing without any glasses. The boys are playing in their shirts. On this day Admiral Kempenfelt fell in with a large convoy from Brest, & took a number of French transports.
Furze is in bloom. Several young lambs at the Priory. Shortest day.
Heard’s well is now dry: it is of a vast depth.
Some of my friends have sported lately in the forst they beat the moors & morasses, & found some jack & whole snipes, most of which they killed, with a teal, a pheasant, & some partridges. The flight of snipes is but small yet. There is now, I hear, a flight of woodcocks in the upland coverts.
Larby now digs & double trenches a weedy spot in the great meadow. The ground is black, & mellow, & fit for carrots, for which it is intended.
Trenched some ground in the meadow for carrots.
George Tanner’s bullfinch, a cock bird of this year, began from it’s first moulting to look dingy; & is now quite black on the back, rump, & all; & very dusky on the breast. This bird has lived chiefly on hemp-seed. But T. Dewey’s, & __ Horley’s two bull-finches, both of the same age with the former, & also of the same sex, retain their natural colours, which are glossy & vivid, tho’ they both have been supported by hemp-seed. Hence the notion that hemp seed blackens bull-finches does not hold good in all instances; or at least not in the first year.
The weather was dark, still, & foggy all the time that I was absent, & the wind mostly N.E. & E.
Theme Ported to