and have often seen them lie crouched along the boughs, cowering so close that one day, going to sling a hammock, I nearly put my hand upon the bird. It slipped off the bough and, with a flight like a woodcock’s, sawing from right to left, it swooped under some gooseberry-bushes and vanished from sight. In the day-time, this power of sudden disappearance is the poor fern-owl’s chief protection from its persecutors, for, starting as if for long flight, it drops upon the ground with a single instantaneous movement, and where it drops there it lies quite motionless—and everybody overruns the spot. Its wonderfully beautiful colouring fortunately assimilates both with the bark of trees and the bare ground, and the cleverest of dogs will overshoot it without discovery. If flushed a second time, it as often as not flies back to the spot, or near it, where it was first startled. At night, when it is feeding, coursing up and down above the heather and the brackens, it has a beautiful flight, and should an owl suddenly drop over the birches and begin to beat their ground, the evolutions of the nightjars in silent protest are as exquisite as any sea-bird’s.

To July belongs the skylark, a bird really of all the year, but most intimately somehow the genius of the meadow. The hay has been cut, the first brood of young are flown, and the larks are again building, renewing the Spring with the aftermath of grass. The glorious growth of the meadow, spangled with ox-eye daisy and corn-flower, has been laid low, and the scented harvest has been carted, and the larks are busier than ever in the smooth-shorn field, while the sky seems never so full of their song as when the hay-makers are afield. The scythe and the terrible machine, and the tramp of feet behind them, are fatal to many a brood, but the majority escape, being on the wing, or, at any rate, running with their parents safely out of danger, by the time that the mowers come.

August is, by sad right, the month of the grouse—a month of catastrophe, for it is then in the best of its health, enjoying the best of the moor and harvest, when the fateful Twelfth comes round; and after the day is over, horrid with perpetual guns,

It is now, too, that the ptarmigan collect into large parties, and, forsaking the highlands, wander lower in search of more varied food: unwise in their generation, for in the higher altitudes they were comparatively safe from many of the perils that beset the grouse. True, when they were up among the clouds they were in the demesnes of the eagle, who thinned their company as they fed upon the shoots of heather and ling growing in tufts among the rocks or in broad patches down some sunny slope—

How silently and swiftly the birds of prey come wheeling round the curve of the cliff, and, skimming the ground, pick up and carry off one of a covey before even its companions can collect their wits to raise an alarm. So in India I have seen the laggar falcon take up a quail and pass on like some shadow, without disturbing the rest, as silent, literally, as the wind, and with an incredible speed. Yet to watch an eagle beating round the base of a hill there seems too much leisureliness for speed. But time its flight, and you will find that though the beats of its wings seem at long intervals it is really going by with great velocity. Its home, and its favourite watchtower, for birds of prey have always some one spot to which, when they wish to be idle, they find their way, is some lofty crag. There seated aloft, they overlook the lowlands where they find their food, without danger of molestation while in repose. For it is always up on the peaks, sometimes looking seaward over the nations of the sea-fowl, but generally inland, where, when the clouds leave it an unbroken prospect, it can sit, like some fierce old warden of the marches, to control the tribes of the valley. It feeds by choice upon lambs, on fawns and hares; so that, though the ptarmigan and grouse pay tribute, they are not harried by the eagle.

When they wander lower down the slopes the game-birds come within the earldom of the falcon, the peregrine, a terrible bird, as fierce as it is swift, and for ever ranging the moors in quest of food. I have known it, in India, chase its quarry right among the tents of the camp, kill it within a few feet of the tethered horses and their attendants, and carry off its prey before there was sense enough among the onlookers to snatch up a gun. When trained they are still as highly prized as of old in England, and at Dholpur I have seen it flown, from the hand, at both egret and duck, and marvelled, the last time as much as the first, at the terrific velocity of its swoop. It seems, too, as if the bird struck its prey with its beak, whereas it always strikes with its talons, striking and clutching almost simultaneously. The fearful impact breaks the quarry’s back, and enables the falcon, if it chooses, to continue its flight with the dead bird in its grasp, without coming to the ground at all.

In England, owing to increased cultivation and the enclosure

of land, falconry is virtually an extinct form of sport, and the few rich men who still keep the flame alive have mitigated the horrors which aroused the indignation of Gifford. “Humanity,” says he, “has seldom obtained a greater triumph than in the abolition of this execrable pursuit.” ... “The blood runs cold while we peruse the calm instructions of the brutal falconer, to impale, tie down, fasten by the beak, break the legs and wings of living pigeons, herns and herons, for the hourly exercise of the hawk, who was thus enabled to pull them to pieces without resistance.”

At one time, being protected, all “British” hawks were common in England, and showed no more fear of man than they do at the present day in India. Indeed, they seemed to display rather a preference for his neighbourhood, following him when in the field, breeding familiarly in buildings, and making dove-cots and poultry-yards their feeding-ground. But now, having learned by a couple of centuries of persecution that they have become unpopular, the hawks avoid humanity and all its ways. Even the common species keep out of sight as much as possible, and some have left the country altogether, or retired to the wildest portions of the islands. The peregrine, for instance, is found at times only here and there in Scotland—and occasionally on cliffs on the Cornish, Welsh, or Cumbrian coasts—and its eyrie is there, as a rule, in the midst of the most desolate scenery. Like the eagle, it has its favourite “post of observation,” and when full-fed and at its ease loves to bask there, and from its elevated seat survey the proceedings of the dwellers at meaner altitudes, upon whom it makes regular forays, and who, strange to say, seem to submit to this assertion of manorial rights with the minimum of protest and disturbance—very much like the unfortunate villeins and vassals in “the good old feudal days” of baronial England.

September is, of course, by long prescription, the partridge’s month, and October the pheasant’s, than which there are no two birds probably in all England that invest a country scene with a more immediate interest and charm. In a certain field through which I used often to pass in the evening, there used to be near a gate a large square patch of ground upon which the farmer had once stacked manure, and the hay never grew on it, only a wonderful crop of chickweed and plantain, with fumitory and other weeds. And every evening, if I walked carefully, I could surprise the partridges with their young brood busy after food on this open plot. As the fancy took them, they would be alarmed by my

approach, vanishing through the surrounding wall of tall meadow-grass in a twinkling, or they would cluck and crane their necks to look at me, and then go on feeding—all except the cock-bird, who invariably fled, and from his hiding-place would keep on making nervous remarks to his wife, who kept as regularly reassuring him with little comfortable clucks that all was right. A little scattered chicken-food brought them very soon through the gate into the garden, and from the garden on to the terrace, where they came at last to feed as regularly and happily as ordinary pigeons. But when September came, and the guns were busy in the farmers’ fields that lay outside their garden-asylum, the covey gradually dwindled away till, out of the nine, only four survived the season. The pheasants, too, were free of the grounds, and they were always in evidence. The carnations had all to be fenced in wherever growing, for the pheasants would not leave them alone, and they were very fond, too, of parading along the wall, and pecking off all the jessamine buds and tips they could reach; but with jessamine we could afford to be liberal, and the birds were allowed to eat all they could. Not all that they would though. For one day, while sitting in a greenhouse, I saw an old cock, the most absurdly vain old bird imaginable, fall off the wall. He tried to reach a tuft of jessamine that was exactly impossible, and after many half tumbles and recoveries of balance with much wing-flapping, he at last made one more desperate effort, just a little more desperate than before, and just too much for his balance, for down he came with a kind of somersault into the garden. And to see him on the ground, how he shook himself and looked round; how affronted he was, and how pompous! If he walked stiffly before, he was now positively on wires. If haughty in demeanour at all times, he was now as superciliously superb as Tamburlane. He moved, like Shakespeare’s peacock, with “a stride and a stand,” the very personification of magnificence embarrassed. And in obedience to his call the two hens, who had been staring from the top of the wall, astonished at the sudden falling-off in stateliness of their dandified emperor, flew down, and he led them off, loftily explaining as he went his reasons for his new method of getting down from a wall, and the advantages that the intelligent derived from such originalities of procedure.

To November we ought to give the woodcock, the aristocrat among our winter visitors. To see one in a winter’s walk makes the walk memorable; we speak for ever so long afterwards of “the day we saw that woodcock.” An old book says: “Of woodcocks especially, it is remarkable that upon a change of the wind to the east, about Allhallows-tide, they will seem to have come all in a night; for though the former day none are to be found, yet the next morning they will be in every bush.” This was three hundred years ago, and woodcocks are not now to be found “in every bush,” even though the wind (as it too often is) be east “about Allhallows-tide,” although that “they seem to have come all in a night” is strictly true, as woodcocks migrate by night, and guns out one day in October that have not flushed a single cock, will the next day make a bag. At one time the bird was so common that weather forecasts were made from its habits, as in Grahame’s “sure harbinger when they so early come, of early winter, tedious and severe,” and Phillips’ “the woodcocks early visit and abode, of long continuance in our temp’rate clime, foretell a lib’ral harvest.” Earlier still, it was another name for a fool, and in Elizabethan authors this synonym for a stupid person occurs with other bird-nicknames with tedious frequency—gull, rook, cormorant—and they are to be collected by the score without difficulty from, say, Nash and Ben Jonson, showing how colloquial in Shakespeare’s day was the general familiarity with birds and their supposed characteristics. When smoking was introduced into England, one of the first names for the pipe was “the woodcock’s head,” the stem being the beak. But why the bird should have become a synonym for a witless person is nowadays difficult to understand, for—except that it comes and goes as a rule on the same tracks to and from its feeding-grounds, and thus tells the trap-setter where to place his snares with deadliest effect—it is a singularly wary bird, and never taken off its guard.

And so we come to December, “the king of the months,” and its wren, “the king of the birds.” Why king? Because it was once decided in a parliament of the birds, that the one

that flew highest should be king. The wren hid itself on the eagle’s back, and when the eagle had flown its highest, the wren flew up a little higher still. And “regulus” it remained, even in science, till quite lately, when some ridiculous fustilarian rechristened it “troglodytes.” Imagine the wren being “troglodytes,” the same, scientifically, as the gorilla! What a poverty it betrays in nomenclature, what a pitiful “superiority to imagination” to find that the wren and the gorilla are undistinguishable to the eye of a Professor. “Diabolus” would have been even better, for science has got no devil now, so the English wren could never have been mistaken for the great man-ape, and besides, in our folk-lore the wren is a very necromantic and wicked little person. The Evil One, it is said, once took possession of its body to serve his evil ends, and infamous enchanters have done the same. So it came to pass that people said it was a good deed and pious to kill wrens, and it is hunted to this day in many places:

This is the wren, troglodytes, in its “demoniacal aspect,” to use the language of Gubernatis. In its benign aspect, “the tiny woodland dwarf,” “the wren with little quill,” is a bird of some sanctity:

for, as everybody knows:

And it is in its connection with that other famous bird of December, the robin-redbreast, that the wren, “Jenny Wren,” is, perhaps, most popular.

Indeed, it is almost impossible to think of one without the

other, for they have been sweethearts ever since English was spoken:

What an enchanting entanglement it is, this of the robin and the wren, and yet we know that it was approved, for when Cock Robin died, all the birds in the air, in sympathy for the dead and for Jenny—

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER III

That rooks do some mischief is beyond doubt. When the ground is frost-bound, and it cannot persecute the farmer’s

enemies that hide in the soil, the rook will feed on turnips. When the potatoes are coming on, the rooks go down between the hills prodding in the earth for the worms and larvæ that assemble to eat the young tubers, and, it may be, eating many of them themselves. When hens’ eggs are left undefended the rook will carry them off. But how very trifling such damage is as compared with the good that is done by this hard-working bird. I have myself allowed an acre of potatoes to swarm day after day with rooks, and when the crop was gathered it was a first-rate one. After that one experience, and the absolute proof of the innocence of those rooks when in my potato-field, I need hardly say that when any farmer complains, or scientist asserts, that these birds do injury to potatoes when growing, I know he is saying “the thing that is not.” I have also had eggs stolen by rooks from a nest that a vagabond fowl had made for herself in the tall meadow-grass. But was the rook to blame? Certainly not. What right has a hen to go and lay her eggs in a meadow, carefully hiding them from her friends in the tall grass, but leaving them conspicuously exposed to every bird that flies over them? As for its depredation on turnips, what difference in the amount of sheep-food do the rooks’ pilferings make in a twenty-acre crop? Instead of grumbling, the intelligent farmer should scatter a barrow-load or two of mangolds conspicuously over the field for the frozen-out birds to eat at their comfort and to keep them from pecking the crops.

Indeed, there is scarcely any other bird that has more claims upon the agriculturist’s goodwill. From sunrise to sunset rooks are always at work, following the farmer’s men wherever they are disturbing the ground, and exterminating insects that are thus exposed. At other times they are patrolling the meadows, going over every foot of ground with extraordinary patience, and we may be sure that nothing that moves escapes their keen inquisitorial eye. When the nests are filled with young ones, the destruction of insect life must be prodigious, for rooks are large birds, and the voracity of the nestlings is enormous. But so long as people will call them crows, and as the immemorial infamy of that name clings to it, so long will the unfortunate birds be persecuted.

Yet in downright industry the farmer has few such friends, or the insect-world such foes. Up in the morning, before the dew is off the grass, before the lark is in the sky, the rooks are hard at work, disposing of the “first worm” and of the winded things of sunshine, which, clogged with moisture, are unable to rise from the ground. As soon as the men are afield, the rooks go to them, following them up and down with unwearying diligence, and tracking the plough, the harrow, and the spade, with the fierce unsparing scrutiny of inquisitors. There is no appeal from them. They hold their court upon the spot, and the summary procedure of their penal code is the same for all malefactors alike.

In another respect, this hard-living bird is deserving of regard, for it prefers the vicinity of human dwellings, and likes to live as near man as possible. Next to a heronry the existence of a rookery is always considered to add a charm to an estate, and not without reason, for, besides investing the place with a fine air of undisturbed ancestral repose, there is something very pleasant and soothing in the clamour of rooks in the peopled elms. To those who care to watch them, the burghers of these “airy cities” are a very entertaining folk. All through the winter, individuals, or small parties visit their nests, just as if they came to inspect and report upon the condition of “their wicker eyries,” and in February these visits become very frequent, the earlier birds pilfering from other nests to add to and strengthen their own. By-and-by the whole community begins to assemble, and the rookery is in most amusing uproar all day, for, for some extraordinary reason, they will not leave each other’s nests alone, but for the sake of one paltry twig, will lay themselves open to retaliations, which result in the entire wrecking of their nests by outraged neighbours, who, though they are so noisily indignant at the thefts of others, are themselves each in turn soon after caught stealing and punished.

And yet somehow or another the nests, in spite of ruinous altercations, manage to get finished, and as soon as eggs are laid, the republic is as orderly as could be expected. But even then, no nest is left undefended. In due course the young rooks are hatched, and the truly terrible task of feeding five mouths is imposed upon the parents. But by constant industry they fulfil their duties, and by the end of April, or early in May, the nestlings scramble off their nests on to the boughs, and by feeble flutterings from point to point, keeping close to their nest all the time, practise and strengthen their wings. Their first flight to the ground is a sight to watch, for the youngsters are very nervous, and the old bird’s patience is sometimes so sorely tried that, having coaxed them to fly in vain, she pushes them off the branch at last. Once on the ground they soon learn what to eat, and how to find it; but the instinct to go to the parents for food is so absurdly persistent, that you may often see a rook that looks as big as its mother, hurriedly gobbling up its own worm, in order to go and ask its mother for hers. And the gravity with which the old bird swallows the worm herself, and then turns to the overgrown young one, with a “Don’t you wish you may get it, my dear?” is delightful. So tenacious are these birds of their old haunts that they are still to be found building in the central postal district of London, although the steady growth of the city makes the distances they have to fly for food longer and longer every year, while the perils they have to encounter on the way, telegraph and telephone wires, are annually accumulating. But there they are, in spite of growing London, and are the very first to bring the news to the city that spring is coming in the country.

Long after the rook, the thrush, and blackbird have told us of the change of season, “the vernal cuckoo” comes shouting “the same song to sing.” There is no parable in Nature so hard to interpret as this bird which the ancients, themselves puzzled, placed on the sceptre of Juno and the shoulder of Venus. The poet who hesitated to call it a bird—

was not in doubt without reason. For it is, indeed, a mystery. Without a single “domestic” instinct, dividing its affections among all the mates it meets, making no nest, caring for no young, leaving the country as it came, without kith and kin, it is a bird to wonder at and to puzzle over. How comes it that it lays so small an egg, and so coloured that it can leave it in little birds’ nests without exciting their suspicion? and what law in Nature makes the small foster-parents so idolise

the little assassin who murders their young that they abandon their own nestlings to their fate without, apparently, any compunction, and concentrate their affection and their pride upon the solitary monster that is left, the destroyer of the rest? And even when the thing has grown so big that its open mouth is almost large enough to engulf its foster-parents, they go on feeding it and following it about as if fascinated by the wretch. Those who wish us to find “sermons in stones, and good in everything,” must surely hesitate when they come to look for a moral in the joyous life of the “plain-song cuckoo gray.” That it eats hairy caterpillars which no other bird dares to swallow for fear of choking, is certainly a point in its favour, and its ever-welcome “spring-delighting” voice is another. But neither its song, “its two old notes,” nor its consumption of “woolly bears,” gives human reason a sufficient explanation of its unique iniquity, or justifies its gay enjoyment of a life of perpetual summer without any responsibilities. The Psalmist, seeing “the wicked flourish,” broke out into bitter song; so might the poor hedge-sparrow and the pipit.

With the cuckoo come many birds from abroad, and all of them welcome, for they fill our gardens and woodlands with varied song, and wage unremitting war upon our insect pests.

There are not, probably, many people who notice either their coming or their going, for spring and winter are supposed to be sufficient explanation in themselves for the commencement and cessation of song. Even those who have gardens do not always notice the little singing-birds from abroad, for their plumage is very modest in colour, their habits are shy and retiring, and their songs always sung from the cover of some brake of fern or bramble, some sequestered corner where only the vagabond butterfly catches sight of them as it goes flickering to and fro in its quest of flowers.

Both garden-warbler and blackcap are more often heard than seen, and their song, by those who have never heard the nightingale, is regularly mistaken for that bird’s. Indeed, when two blackcaps are singing against each other, the alternating songs seem continuous, and the strength of the voice and the extreme beauty of their notes arrest the ear at once, while, being so unlike the song of either blackbird or thrush, which are heard as a rule only from tops of trees, the music is at once called the nightingale’s. Or how many of us notice the woodlark (a bird that stays with us all the winter through), even though its song is finer than the skylark’s?

On the wing, no doubt, it is mistaken for “the lark,” but when singing, especially at night, in the shrubbery or copse, as often for the nightingale; yet it is common enough, and if those who care to do so will, when they hear its exquisite song, stop and look round for the singer, they will see, sitting on a branch, a bird just like the skylark, but will notice, if they listen, that its voice is richer and its notes more varied than the laverock’s, and that the bird shifts from one perch to another while it is singing, sometimes even mounting to the top of a tree, and thence, still in song, flying up into the air to circle. If you startle a skylark it will never, you will notice, fly to woodland for shelter, but only to another part of the meadow or into the next, and settle there on the ground, so that whenever a bird that you think is a “lark” flies on being startled into a tree, you may be sure it is the “soft enamoured woodlark”—next to the nightingale the sweetest minstrel of the copse.

A skylark, as every one knows, sings, as a rule, when in the air, but it, too, will sing upon the ground; and in its cage, forgetful apparently of its captivity, pours out its song with the same enchanting gaiety as when it is free of all the sky.

As seen in Nature, there can be nothing imagined more exultant, more heartily joyous, than the glad, eager way in which the skylark seems to spring up from the meadow and commence its artless canticles of praise as thanks for its happiness and freedom. Yet, perched upon a scrap of turf, in a cage so low-roofed that it cannot attempt to rise, it sings the same “strains of unpremeditated art” that so charmed the great poet, and live for ever in his deathless verse. Even in winter, on a sunny day, the lark will soar up into the air “like an embodied joy whose race is just begun,” and “shower a rain of melody.” For some stay with us all the year round, though most of their companions go, and in such vast flocks that fifteen thousand have been caught in a single night out of a flight passing a single spot. And, poor little birds, wherever they rest on their journey they find nets spread for them, for every nation alike is agreed that larks are good to eat; and so they go, to and fro, literally “larding the earth” with their bodies. Yet in spite of these periodical massacres, and in spite of perennial persecution for the cage and the table, their numbers never seem to lessen, and our skies and meadows are as full of them one year as another. And it is well that it is so, for what should we miss more in a country walk than “the lark’s blithe carol from the clouds”?

Yet, introduced into New Zealand, they have become a pest, ravaging the cornfields when the blade first appears above ground, and pulling up, grain by grain, every plant in the field. The goldfinch, also imported into the colony, now flies about in wisps of hundreds, inflicting serious damage on the buds of crops and fruit-trees. It is a severe lesson this in natural history that we have learned, trying to exchange the wild creatures of different continents. Australia is in despair over the rabbit, and the Colonies and America alike hold the sparrow in abomination.

When I was travelling in the United States in 1883, I drew the sparrow-line from personal observation at Omaha on the east and Salt Lake City on the west. From the one side it had not then crossed the Mississippi. But it was steadily advancing, the aggressive little fowl, from both seaboards, and while it had pushed forward from the Atlantic into Illinois, so from the Pacific it had then travelled as far as Nevada. The tyranny of the sparrow is part of the price men pay for civilisation. Only savages are exempt. In America it has developed into a multitudinous evil, to which our own grievance against the bird is nothing; has dispossessed the children of the soil, and thrust its Saxon assumption of superiority upon the feathered natives of the country.

Sparrows do not respect Congress, and take no notice of legislative enactments for their extirpation. Imported as an insect-eating treasure, they have turned out grain-devouring impostors, and presuming upon the affectionate sentiments of exiled Englishmen have become a veritable calamity, and practically are officially branded as “vermin.” In New York and other cities, the townsfolk began by putting up nesting-boxes for the birds to build in, in the public gardens and on corners of buildings. But now, if they could, they would introduce a pestilence among them and exterminate the race. It is the same in Australia, and the man who “invented” the sparrow stands in the monument of public infamy only one niche lower than “the man who invented the rabbit.” And “pity ’tis ’tis so.” For the sparrow is not an unamiable fowl. The poet who blesses it “twittering forth its morning song, a brief but sweet domestic melody,” went perhaps too far, for if there is one thing for which “the nightingale of our roofs” deserves persecution, it is the exasperating monotony of its soulless chirp, and thus it is that one feels inclined to echo all Prior’s abuse of it:

But in spite of its monstrous impudence, or partly, perhaps, because of it, the sparrow is really a popular favourite. Of course, no one takes it very seriously. When the cat is seen on the lawn with a bird in its mouth, there is at first a thrill of indignation and horror, but when some one says, “It’s only a sparrow,” the indignation is greatly modified and the horror subsides. For though the cat may not catch a chaffinch without reprobation, she may fatten on sparrows without reproach.

Trying once to breed poultry, I found that ten sparrows to every fowl meant double expense in feeding, and as the sparrows were not starving, but only too lazy to go and find food in the fields, I had no compunction in “harrying” them, though I would not allow any one on the place to touch the nest of any other bird whatsoever. Not that sparrows care for persecution when it takes the form of pulling down their nests, for they seem to rejoice at the opportunity of beginning housekeeping all over again, and, as I have proved by experiment, will have started a new family in a new nest three days after the old nursery has been destroyed. What they detest is wire-netting of too fine a mesh for them to get through and the spectacle of grain scattered inside which they cannot reach. It is then that poor feeble man triumphs over the obstreperous sparrow and can exult over the birds as they hop, chirping round and round the impossible feast.

In London there is always enough food for the small creatures, and even in the hardest winter, when blackbirds and thrushes and all kinds of other birds, unsuspected residents many of them, are picked up dead in the parks and gardens, the sparrow is not pinched. So that in the popularity of the sparrow there is no tenderness involved. Londoners like him because he is one of themselves, because he is plucky and self-reliant, taking things much as they come; because he stands upon his rights, or what he has come to call his rights; is robust, and never “down at the mouth.” He is a dirty little ragamuffin, but not in the least ashamed of himself, for he takes his small smoky dusty person into the presence of Royalty with as much assurance as into a mews, and chirps as complacently all through service in Westminster Abbey as in a rain-spout in Shoreditch. The metropolitan cat seldom arrives at a sparrow, just as the small gamins of the streets never get run over by cabs. Their whole lives are spent in evasion, and they develop an extraordinary agility in escaping from accidents. I find it very hard to defend the familiar little fowl and almost as hard to accuse him. That he behaves with levity in places of public worship, that he is disrespectful to bye-laws and perpetually trespassing, is true enough; but how can you bring such misdemeanours home to a bird who hops up a water-pipe in reply to your charges? In private life, too, he is disreputable. As a frivolous parent given to rolling the eggs out of the nest, and even also his infant progeny; as an unworthy spouse, transferring his affections lightly, and often assaulting the partner of his joys and sorrows (and in return as often assaulted by her); as a bad neighbour, scuffling with his kind whenever he meets them—in each of these respects he presents himself to the severely moral mind as undeserving of respect. Yet with something of the eccentricity of judgment which commends to public regard the truly infamous Punch, who hangs the hangman, kills his wife, and throws the baby out of the window, we persist in looking upon the sparrow, with all his notorious faults, as a popular favourite and resent any serious exposure of his obliquities.