The whole extent of the garden, with its croft and orchard, is not three acres, but a fair proportion of the British mammals are from time to time to be found there.

The old church, largely built of timber, picturesque and quaint, stands within a few yards of the house and its roof affords shelter to many bats. We find the wings of moths, the remnants of their feasts, scattered on the floor (I have noticed the wings of a tortoise-shell butterfly among them), and I have found there more than one dead body of a common bat; I cannot say whether that is the only kind we have, but in 1908 a bat was seen near the house which, from the description given of its size and manner of flight, may perhaps have been a noctule.

On May 28th, 1899, there was an eclipse of the sun; it was only partial, and made very little difference to the light, but just so long as it lasted, from 3 to 4.30 p.m., I saw a bat flying busily round and about the church.

The soil is light and worms seem to be abundant, but one hardly ever sees a mole-hill in this part of Cheshire. One day, however, in December, 1899, we noticed that a bed of parsley had withered in a mysterious way, and when we came to look, the ground was quite undermined with mole-runs. These were very shallow, and there was no sign of a hillock above. Many of the roots of the parsley had been entirely eaten off, and we saw that nearly all that remained in the bed were full of grubs. These grubs it must have been, I suppose, that attracted the mole, but it is curious that such an exceptional condition of the roots should have been discovered, considering how seldom there is any sign of a mole in the neighbourhood. We noticed that the root of a strong raspberry cane on one side of the parsley bed had been eaten off in the same way, but it is not very likely that this would have had grubs in it.

Hedgehogs are not uncommon and we sometimes see them in broad daylight. In July one year (1900) every evening for about a week we used to see a large hedgehog running along a broad gravel walk close to the windows of the house. It came always at the same time, "just at the edge of dark," as they say here, and it always took the same route and disappeared at the same place.

Later on in the month we found a young one, a most delightful little animal, as friendly and tame as possible. We used to feed him with milk every day as long as he stayed here, which was about a week, and once when we expected some boys in the garden we brought him into the house and put him in a box. He strongly objected to the imprisonment, loudly protesting all the time in a voice like the squeaking of a rat, and it was surprising to see how nearly he managed to get out, though the sides of the box were almost two feet high.

Stoats, commonly called weasels with us, were fairly common when we had more rats and rabbits, but we do not often see one now (1912). We had a white terrier that killed several, though I had an idea that dogs looked on stoats as a kind of ferret and did not hurt them.

We can count a fox among our occasional visitors. I have watched one for some time that was smelling about among the shrubs just opposite to the front door about eight o'clock on a Sunday morning.

We are out of the regular beat of the Cheshire Hounds here, and I fancy the secret slaying of a fox is not accounted a very heinous crime, certainly the foxes that are often reported soon disappear. In 1899 a fox had its "earth" in the Abbey Croft, a field next to the garden, and we used to like to hear him barking in the still summer evenings. In the end, however, the keepers were too many for him, and he had to shift his quarters or else it may have been his lease of life ran out.

We suffered very much at one time from the plague of rats. They infested the out-buildings and the house itself, and for a long while we were in despair about them. We tried poison, with the result that dead rats made the kitchen uninhabitable and entailed the expense and nuisance of taking up the floor, and still they came. We tried every kind of trap, we had the whole of the outside walls examined, and every possible entrance hole stopped, so at least we thought, but still they came. At last we found that the simple expedient of doing away with the ashpit deprived the premises of their chief attraction in a rat's eyes, for then we had to burn on the kitchen fire all the vegetable and other refuse that formerly found its way to the ashpit, and provided such abundant and appetizing food. Certain it is that since we did this, more than twelve years ago now (1912), we never have had a rat in the house.

I have heard of large young fowls being killed by rats at farms not far away, but I do not remember that they ever took one of our chickens; indeed, at a time when we used to see many rats there, a hen sat in the stable and safely hatched her chicks. I recollect an old rat that used to come every day to feed with the fowls without any objection to his presence on their part.

Rabbits were another great nuisance. They had burrows among the tree-roots on the river bank and no one seemed able to get them out or to shoot them, so between what they ate and what they dug up, we hadn't much pleasure in the garden. At last we cut off so much of the garden as we could surround with wire netting and left the rest to take its chance. No sooner had we done this than, for what reason I cannot tell, the rabbits disappeared completely, and for two or three years we hardly ever saw one on our own ground, though they seemed to be as plentiful as usual elsewhere.

We have sometimes caught long-tailed field-mice that were eating the peas, and the cats seemed to find voles and shrews pretty often.

I must confess to rather a weakness for common mice; they are pretty to look at and amusing in their ways. To give an instance of their ingenuity and enterprise, I remember some time in the summer of 1899, when we used to have a basin of sugar left in our room at night, a certain mouse appeared to think that it was placed there for his own special benefit, at any rate he was accustomed to help himself very freely to it. We could hear him working away to get a lump over the side of the basin, then rolling it along to the edge of the table and letting it fall to the floor, along which he would again roll it to a hole under the skirting-board. Sometimes he would take in this way as many as three or four lumps of sugar in one night. Besides the sugar there was often bread and butter left in the room between two plates, and one morning when I took the top one off out jumped the mouse. I cannot imagine how it got in. It certainly couldn't make its way out again, which one should have thought a far easier thing to do. The plates seemed to be exactly as I had left them the night before, and I could not see that any of the bread and butter had been eaten.

I remember what seems to me an extraordinary instance of a mouse's power of smelling out food. In the new parish church here (consecrated in 1885) the vestry is in the tower, and its ceiling, which is the floor of the bellringing-room, must be nearly 20 ft. from the ground. Just under this ceiling were suspended at one time three very long texts; they were drawn up by pulleys with a rope that was fastened off about six feet from the floor. One of these texts was used at harvest festivals, and a fringe of corn had been left round the border, but all three were elaborately done up together in brown paper, so that none of the corn could be seen. Happening to be at the church one day I found the caretaker had brought out these texts into the churchyard, because he had seen, he said, a mouse running up to them by the suspending cord. Sure enough, when he undid the wrapping the poor little thing was there, and I am sorry to say was promptly killed. I thought its wonderful cleverness deserved a better fate. The church was newly built with concrete floors, and there was no regular food supply to attract mice, so this particular mouse must have come in casually on the mere chance of picking up something, and it must from the floor, nearly 20 ft. below, have found out that there was corn in one of the bundles of texts behind the brown paper that covered them, and I think more wonderful still, it must have discovered the only way of reaching it, along the suspending cord.

There used to be an old piano in the Parish Room close to the new church. This was not often used and one day when we lifted the cover from the back part of the keyboard we found snugly placed in a corner of the bass notes an empty mouse's nest, quite round like a bird's, and beautifully made of dried bits of grass and coloured worsted. It seems strange that a mouse should have found such a place for its nest, and stranger still that in a new large bare room, with a solid wood-block floor, it should have been able unobserved to go in and out continually to fetch the materials for it. This it must have done, since none came from the room itself.

The long broad garden walk by the side of the house seems to be a favourite thoroughfare for hares; we constantly see them passing at all times of the year. I wish myself there were not quite so many hares in Warburton as there are. We could do very well with fewer in the gardens and orchards, and there would then be less inducement to hold such frequent public coursing meetings, which, in my opinion, we could do very well without. Some years before 1900 a large number were imported and turned down. These were at first a great annoyance to everybody, and did much damage to fruit trees even in mild open weather; it was almost unbelievable the height to which they could reach, gnawing off every bit of bark all the way round. They were, besides, far too thick upon the ground for their own comfort. I was told by a man who worked on the estate that he often came across bucks fighting together; they fought so savagely, he said, that they would hardly get out of his way, and almost knocked up against him. They begin fighting, it appears from his account, by giving slaps with their forefeet, but in the end they go on to worry at one another like dogs.