They use them for baytes; and they squeeze these
knotts together and make little kind of cheeses of them for eating.
CHAPTER XII.
BIRDS.
WE have great plenty of larkes, and very good ones, especially in
Golem-fields and those parts adjoyning to Coteswold. They take them by
alluring them with a dareing-glasse,* which is whirled about in a sun-
shining day, and the larkes are pleased at it, and strike at it, as at
a sheepe's eye, and at that time the nett is drawn over them. While he
playes with his glasse he whistles with his larke-call of silver, a
tympanum of about the diameter of a threepence. In the south part of
Wiltshire they doe not use dareing-glasses but catch these pretty
?theriall birds with trammolls.
* ["Let his grace go forward, and dare us with his cap like larks."
- Shakspere, Henry VIII. Act iii. sc. 2.]
The buntings doe accompany the larkes. Linnets on the downes.
Woodpeckers severall sorts: many in North Wilts.
Sir Bennet Hoskins, Baronet, told me that his keeper at his parke at
Morehampton in Hereford-shire, did, for experiment sake, drive an
iron naile thwert the hole of the woodpecker's nest, there being a
tradition that the damme will bring some leafe to open it. He layed at
the bottome of the tree a cleane sheet, and before many houres passed
the naile came out, and he found a leafe lying by it on the sheete.
Quaere the shape or figure of the leafe. They say the moone-wort will
doe such things.
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