Hardback, Collins, Pocket Novels series, [1929].
Book condition: lacking the dust wrapper, back cover severely damp-stained, and gilt lettering on spine worn. Internally a tight, fine copy.

Sandwiched between Dandelion Daysand The Dream of Fair Women, this collection of sixteen vivid short stories, or nature essays, includes tales of badger, raven, swallows, foxes, owls, humans, a mouse, a weed, and peregrine falcons. These stories portray nature with a stark realism, natural life as it really is (the aphorism ‘red in tooth and claw’ applies) but also with a tender, lyrical insight. Some of the stories involve humans in all their strength and weakness, nobility and wretchedness. In fact HW hardly differentiates between human and animal in these portraits of the natural scene.

As with The Lone Swallows, several of the stories had already appeared in magazines in this country and the USA.

(For a further consideration of the book and the background to the writing of it, see Anne Williamson's The Peregrine's Saga.)