The Natural History of Selborne

Wild-geese appear.  On the downs, & Salisbury plain they feed much on green wheat in the winter, & towards the spring damage it much, so that the farmers set up figures to scare them away.

The stream at Fyfield is dry.  My brother Henry’s crops of trufles have failed for two or three years past.  He supposed they may have been devoured by large broods of turkies that have ranged much about his home-fields, & little groves.

The runs dusty, & the chaises run on the summer tracks, on the downs.  Lovely clouds, & sky!! Turnips on the downs are bad.  Wheat looks well.  Men chalk the downs in some parts.

Tortoise begins to bury himself in the laurel-hedge.

Planted many slips of pinks.

If a masterly lands-cape painter was to take our hanging woods in their autumnal colours, persons unacquainted with the country, would object to the strength & deepness of the tints, & would pronounce, at an exhibition, that they were heightened & shaded beyond nature.  Wonderful & lovely to the Imagination are the colourings of our wood-land scapes at this season of the year!

“The pale descending year, yet pleasing still,/A gentler mood inspires; for now the leaf/Incessant rustles from the mournful grove,/Oft startling such as, studious, walk below,/And slowly circles thro’ the waving air./But should a quicker breeze amid the boughs/Sob, o’er the sky the leafy deluge streams;/Till chak’d & matted with the dreary shower,/The forest-walks, at every rising gale,Roll wide the wither’d wast, & whistle bleak.” — Thompson’s Autumn

The firing of the great guns at Portsmouth on this day, the King’s accession, shook the walls & windows of my house.

The poor make quite a second harvest by gathering of acorns.  Timothy Turner has purchased upwards of 40 bushels.  Two truflers came with their dogs to hunt our hangers, & beechen woods in search of truffles; several of which they found in the deep narrow part of the hill between coney-croft-hanger, & the high wood; & again on each side of the hollow road up the high-wood, known by the name of coach-road.

Nasturtiums in high bloom, & untouched by the frost!

Mowed & burnt the dead grass in my fields.  Rooks on the hill attended by a numerous flock of starlings.  The tortoise gets under the laurel-hedge, but does not bury himself.  Neps. T. H. & H. Holt white returned from Fyfield.  … “a crouded umbrage, dusk & dun,/Of ev’ry hue, from wan, declining green;/To sooty dark.”  Thomson.