The Natural History of Selborne

The dry air crisps my plaster in the new parlor.

The sun at tsetting shines into the E. corner of my great parlor.

Foxes begin now to be very rank, & to smell so high that as one rides along of a morning it is easy to distinguish where they have been the night before.  At this season the intercourse between the sexes commences; & the females intimate their wants to the males by three or four little sharp yelpings or barkings frequently repeated.  This anecdote I learned by living formerly at an house opposite to a neighbour that kept a tame bitch-fox, which every spring about candlemass began her amorous serenade as soon as it grew dark, & continued it nightly thro’ ye months of Feb. & March.

Ravens carry over materials & seem to be building.

Frost comes in a doors.  Little shining particles of ice, appear on the ceiling, cornice, & walls of my great parlor the vapor condensed on the plaster is frozen in spite of frequent fires in the chimney.  I now set a chafing dish of clear-burnt charcoal in the room on the floor.

Snow on the ground, which is icy, & slippery.

The wind very still, for so low a barometer.  Foxes abound in the neighbourhood, & are very mischievous among the farm-yards, & hen roosts.  The fox-hounds have lately harrassed Harteley-woods, & have driven them out of those strong coverts, & thickets.

There is reason to fear that the plasterer has done a mischief to the last coat of my battin-plaster that should carry the paper of my room by improvidently mixing wood-ashes with the morter; because the alcaline salts of the wood will be very long before they will be dry at all, & will be apt to relax & turn moist again when foggy damp weather returns.  If any ashes at all he should have used sea-coal, & not vegetable ashes; but a mixture of loam & horses dung would have been best.

Fires are made every day in my new parlour: the walls sweat much.

A fox ran up the street at noon-day.  No birds love to fly down the wind, which protrudes them too fast & hurries them out of their poise: besides it blows-up their feathers, & exposes them to the cold.  All birds love to perch as well a to fly with their heads to the windward.  FOOTNOTE:  The christenings at Faringdon near Alton, Hants from the year 1760 to 1777 inclusive were 152: the burials at the same place in the same period were 124.  So that the births exceed the deaths by 28.  I have buried many very old people there: yet of late several young folks have dyed of a decline.