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Et ailleurs, dans un sonnet comm?moratoire, dat? du 6 avril 1338: <>

Cette soci?t? de jeunes amis revint apr?s un ?t? et un automne ? Avignon, rappel?e dans cette capitale par l'arriv?e du cardinal Colonna, oncle de l'?v?que de Lombez. Jacques Colonna donna P?trarque ? son oncle le cardinal. Ce prince romain logea P?trarque dans son palais d'Avignon, et traita en fils le jeune po?te; il le destinait ? illustrer un jour sa maison dans la diplomatie et dans les lettres. Ces M?c?nes eccl?siastiques ou la?ques rivalisaient alors, en Italie, de patronage pour les grands talents susceptibles de servir leur propre gloire; le palais du cardinal Colonna ?tait la cour du g?nie italien. Le chef de cette illustre maison, ?tienne Colonna, vint, ? son tour, visiter ses fr?res et ses neveux ? Avignon; il y go?ta avec passion le talent de P?trarque. Un sonnet, dat? sans doute de Vaucluse, que P?trarque adresse ? cet homme illustre, rappelle les douceurs de la retraite, des champs, des plaisirs de coeur et d'esprit go?t?s ensemble dans la vall?e de Vaucluse!

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Vers le m?me temps, lese young cuckoo was lying in the bottom of the nest, helpless as a piece of jelly with a little life in it, and with just strength enough in his neck to lift his head and open his mouth; and then, after a second or two, the wavering head would drop again. At eight o'clock next morning , I found that one robin had come out of the shell, and one egg had been ejected and was lying a few inches below the nest on the sloping bank. Yet the young cuckoo still appeared a weak, helpless, jelly-like creature, as on the previous day. But he had increased greatly in size. I believe that in forty-eight hours from the time of hatching he had quite doubled his bulk, and had grown darker, his naked skin being of a bluish-black colour. The robin, thirty or more hours younger, was little more than half his size, and had a pale, pinkish-yellow skin, thinly clothed with a long black down. The cuckoo occupied the middle of the deep, cup-shaped nest, and his broad back, hollow in the middle, formed a sort of false bottom; but there was a small space between the bird's sides and the nest, and in this space or interstice the one unhatched egg that still remained and the young robin were lying.

During this day I observed that the pressure of the egg and young robin against his sides irritated the cuckoo: he was continually moving, jerking and wriggling his lumpish body this way and that, as if to get away from the contact. At intervals this irritation would reach its culminating point, and a series of mechanical movements would begin, all working blindly but as surely towards the end as if some devilish intelligence animated the seemingly helpless infant parasite.

The process in each case was as follows: The pressure of the egg against the cuckoo's side, as I have said, was a constant irritation; but the irritability varied in degree in different parts of the body. On the under parts it scarcely existed; its seat was chiefly on the upper surface, beginning at the sides and increasing towards the centre, and was greatest in the hollow of the back. When, in moving, the egg got pushed up to the upper edge of his side, he would begin to fidget more and more, and this would cause it to move round, and so to increase the irritation by touching and pressing against other parts. When all the bird's efforts to get away from the object had only made matters worse, he would cease wriggling and squat down lower and lower in the bottom of the nest, and the egg, forced up, would finally roll right into the cavity in his back--the most irritable part of all. Whenever this occurred, a sudden change that was like a fit would seize the bird; he would stiffen, rise in the nest, his flabby muscles made rigid, and stand erect, his back in a horizontal position, the head hanging down, the little naked wings held up over the back. In that position he looked an ugly, lumpish negro mannikin, standing on thinnest dwarf legs, his back bent, and elbows stuck up above the hollow flat back.

Once up on his small stiffened legs he would move backwards, firmly grasping the hairs and hair-like fibres of the nest-lining, and never swerving, until the rim of the cup-like structure was reached; and then standing, with feet sometimes below and in some cases on the rim, he would jerk his body, throwing the egg off or causing it to roll off. After that he would fall back into the nest and lie quite exhausted for some time, his jelly-like body rising and falling with his breathing.

These changes in the bird strongly reminded me of a person with an epileptic fit, as I had been accustomed to see it on the pampas, where, among the gauchos, epilepsy is one of the commonest maladies;--the sudden rigidity of muscle in some weak, sickly, flabby-looking person, the powerful grip of the hand, the strength in struggling, exceeding that of a man in perfect health, and finally, when this state is over, the weakness of complete exhaustion.

I witnessed several struggles with the egg, but at last, in spite of my watchfulness, I did not see it ejected. On returning after a very short absence, I found the egg had been thrown out and had rolled down the bank, a distance of fourteen inches from the nest.

The young cuckoo appeared to rest more quietly in the nest now, but after a couple of hours the old fidgeting began again, and increased until he was in the same restless state as before. The rapid growth of the birds made the position more and more miserable for the cuckoo, since the robin, thrust against the side of the nest, would throw his head and neck across the cuckoo's back, and he could not endure being touched there. And now a fresh succession of struggles began, the whole process being just the same as when the egg was struggled with. But it was not so easy with the young bird, not because of its greater weight, but because it did not roll like the egg and settle in the middle of the back; it would fall partly on to the cuckoo's back and then slip off into the nest again. But success came at last, after many failures. The robin was lying partly across the cuckoo's neck, when, in moving its head, its little curved beak came down and rested on the very centre of that irritable hollow in the back of its foster-brother. Instantly the cuckoo pressed down into the nest, shrinking away as if hot needles had pricked him, as far as possible from the side where the robin was lying against him, and this movement of course brought the robin more and more over him, until he was thrown right upon the cuckoo's back.

Instantly the rigid fit came on, and up rose the cuckoo, as if the robin weighed no more than a feather on him; and away backwards he went, right up the nest, without a pause, and standing actually on the rim, jerked his body, causing the robin to fall off, clean away from the nest. It fell, in fact, on to a large dock leaf five inches below the rim of the nest, and rested there.

After getting rid of his burden the cuckoo continued in the same position, perfectly rigid, for a space of five or six seconds, during which it again and again violently jerked its body, as if it had the feeling of the burden on it still. Then, the fit over, it fell back, exhausted as usual.

Marvellous as the power of the young cuckoo is when the fit is on him, it is of course limited, and when watching his actions I concluded that it would be impossible for him to eject eggs and nestlings from any thrush's nest. The blackbird's would be too deep, and as to the throstle's, he could not move backwards up the sides of the cup-like cavity on account of the smooth plastered surface.

After having seen the young robin cast out I still refrained from touching the nest, as there were yet other things to observe. One was the presence, very close to the nest, of the ejected nestling--what would the parents do in the case? Before dealing with that matter I shall conclude the history of the young cuckoo.

The young cuckoo grew rapidly and soon trod his nest into a broad platform, on which he reposed, a conspicuous object in the scanty herbage on the bank. We often visited and fed him, when he would puff up his plumage and strike savagely at our hands, but at the same time he would always gobble down the food we offered. In seventeen days after being hatched he left the nest and took up his position in an oak tree growing on the bank, and there the robins continued feeding him for the next three days, after which we saw no more of him.

I may add that in May 1901 a pair of robins built on the bank close to where the nest had been made the previous year, and that in this nest a cuckoo was also reared. The bird, when first seen, was apparently about four or five days old, and it had the nest to itself. Three ejected robin's eggs were lying on the bank a little lower down.

It is hardly to be doubted that the robins were the same birds that had reared the cuckoo in the previous season; and it is highly probable that the same cuckoo had returned to place her egg in their nest.

The end of the little history--the fate of the ejected nestling and the attitude of the parent robins--remains to be told. When the young cuckoo throws out the nestlings from nests in trees, hedges, bushes, and reeds, the victims, as a rule, fall some distance to the ground, or in the water, and are no more seen by the old birds. Here the young robin, when ejected, fell a distance of but five or six inches, and rested on a broad, bright green leaf, where it was an exceedingly conspicuous object; and when the mother robin was on the nest--and at this stage she was on it a greater part of the time--warming that black-skinned, toad-like, spurious babe of hers, her bright, intelligent eyes were looking full at the other one, just beneath her, which she had grown in her body and had hatched with her warmth, and was her very own. I watched her for hours; watched her when warming the cuckoo, when she left the nest and when she returned with food, and warmed it again, and never once did she pay the least attention to the outcast lying there so close to her. There, on its green leaf, it remained, growing colder by degrees, hour by hour, motionless, except when it lifted its head as if to receive food, then dropped it again, and when, at intervals, it twitched its body as if trying to move. During the evening even these slight motions ceased, though that feeblest flame of life was not yet extinguished; but in the morning it was dead and cold and stiff; and just above it, her bright eyes on it, the mother robin sat on the nest as before, warming her cuckoo.

How amazing and almost incredible it seems that a being such as a robin, intelligent above most birds as we are apt to think, should prove in this instance to be a mere automaton! The case would, I think, have been different if the ejected one had made a sound, since there is nothing which more excites the parent bird, or which is more instantly responded to, than the cry of hunger or distress of the young. But at this early stage the nestling is voiceless--another point in favour of the parasite. The sight of its young, we see, slowly and dumbly dying, touches no chord in the parent: there is, in fact, no recognition; once out of the nest it is no more than a coloured leaf, or a bird-shaped pebble, or fragment of clay.

It happened that my young fellow-watchers, seeing that the ejected robin if left there would inevitably perish, proposed to take it in to feed and rear it--to save it, as they said; but I advised them not to attempt such a thing, but rather to spare the bird. To spare it the misery they would inflict upon it by attempting to fill its parents' place. They had, so far, never kept a caged bird, nor a pet bird, and had no desire to keep one; all they desired to do in this case was to save the little outcast from death--to rear it till it was able to fly away and take care of itself. That was a difficult, a well-nigh impossible task. The bird, at this early stage, required to be fed at short intervals for about sixteen hours each day on a peculiar kind of food, suited to its delicate stomach--chiefly small caterpillars found in the herbage; and it also needed a sufficient amount by day and night of that animal warmth which only the parent bird could properly supply. They, not being robins, would give it unsuitable food, feed it at improper times, and not keep it at the right temperature, with the almost certain result that after lingering a few days it would die in their hands. But if by giving a great deal of time and much care they should succeed in rearing it, their foundling would start his independent life so handicapped, weakened in constitution by an indoor artificial bringing up, without the training which all young birds receive from their parents after quitting the nest, that it would be impossible for him to save himself. If by chance he should survive until August, he would then be set upon and killed by one of the adult robins already in possession of the ground. Now, when a bird at maturity perishes, it suffers in dying--sometimes very acutely; but if left to grow cold and fade out of life at this stage it can hardly be said to suffer. It is no more conscious than a chick in the shell; take from it the warmth that keeps it in being, and it drops back into nothingness without knowing and, we may say, without feeling anything. There may indeed be an incipient consciousness in that small, soft brain in its early vegetative stage, a first faint glimmer of bright light to be, and a slight sensation of numbness may be actually felt as the body grows cold, but that would be all.

The power to feel pain in any great degree comes into the bird's life after this transitional period, and is greatest at maturity, when consciousness and all the mental faculties are fully developed, particularly the passion of fear, which plays continually on the strings of the wild creature's heart with an ever varying touch, producing the feeling in all degrees from the slight disquiet, which is no sooner come than gone, to extremities of agonising terror. It would perhaps have a wholesome effect on their young minds, and save them from grieving over-much at the death of a newly-hatched robin, if they would consider this fact of the pain that is and must be. Not the whole subject--the fact that as things are designed in this world of sentient life there can be no good, no sweetness or pleasure in life, nor peace and contentment and safety, nor happiness and joy, nor any beauty or strength or lustre, nor any bright and shining quality of body or mind, without pain, which is not an accident nor an incident, nor something ancillary to life, but is involved in and a part of life, of its very colour and texture. That would be too long to speak about; all I meant was to consider that small part of the fact, the necessary pain to and destruction of the bird life around them and in the country generally.

Here, for instance, without going farther than a hundred yards from the house in any direction, they could put their hands in nests in trees and bushes, and on the ground, and in the ivy, and in the old outhouse, and handle and count about one hundred and thirty young birds not yet able to fly. Probably more than twice that number would be successfully reared during the season. How many, then, would be reared in the whole parish! How many in the entire New Forest district, in the whole county of Hampshire, in the entire kingdom! Yet when summer came round again they would find no more birds than they had now. And so it would be in all places; all that incalculable increase would have perished. Many millions would be devoured by rapacious birds and beasts; millions more would perish of hunger and cold; millions of migrants would fall by the way, some in the sea and some on land; those that returned from distant regions would be but a remnant, and the residents that survived through the winter, these, too, would be nothing but a remnant. It is not only that this inconceivable amount of bird life must be destroyed each year, but we cannot suppose that death is not a painful process. In a vast majority of cases, whether the bird slowly perishes of hunger and weakness, or is pursued and captured by birds and beasts of prey, or is driven by cold adverse winds and storms into the waves, the pain, the agony must be great. The least painful death is undoubtedly that of the bird that, weakened by want of sustenance, dies by night of cold in severe weather. It is indeed most like the death of the nestling, but a few hours out of the shell, which has been thrown out of the nest, and which soon grows cold, and dozes its feeble, unconscious life away.

We may say, then, that of all the thousand forms of death which Nature has invented to keep her too rapidly multiplying creatures within bounds, that which is brought about by the singular instinct of the young cuckoo in the nest is the most merciful or the least painful.

I am not sure that I said all this, or marshalled fact and argument in the precise order in which they are here set down. I fancy not, as it seems more than could well have been spoken while we were standing there in the late evening sunlight by that primrose bank, looking down on the little flesh-coloured mite in its scant clothing of black down, fading out of life on its cold green leaf. But what was said did not fail of its effect, so that my young tender-hearted hearers, who had begun to listen with moist eyes, secretly accusing me perhaps of want of feeling, were content in the end to let it be--to go away and leave it to its fate in that mysterious green world we, too, live in and do not understand, in which life and death and pleasure and pain are interwoven light and shade.

Between the Boldre and the Exe--Abuse of the New Forest--Character of the population--New Forest code and conscience--A radical change foreshadowed--Tenacity of the Forest fly--Oak woods of Beaulieu--Swallow and pike--Charm of Beaulieu--Instinctive love of open spaces--A fragrant heath--Nightjars--Snipe--Redshanks--Pewits--Cause of sympathy with animals--Grasshopper and spider--A rapacious fly--Melancholy moods--Evening on the heath--"World-strangeness"--Pixie mounds--Death and burial--The dead in the barrows--Their fear of the living.

Between the Boldre and the Exe, or Beaulieu river, there is a stretch of country in most part flat and featureless. It is one of those parts of the Forest which have a bare and desolate aspect; here in places you can go a mile and not find a tree or bush, where nothing grows but a starved-looking heath, scarcely ankle-deep. Wild life in such places is represented by a few meadow-pipits and small lizards. There is no doubt that this barrenness and naked appearance is the result of the perpetual cutting of heath and gorse, and the removal of the thin surface soil for fuel.

Those who do not know the New Forest, or know it only as a collecting- or happy hunting-ground of eggers and "lepidopterists," or as artists in search of paintable woodland scenery know it, and others who make it a summer holiday resort, may say that this abuse is one which might and should be remedied. They would be mistaken. What I and a few others who use their senses see and hear in this or that spot, is, in every case, a very small matter, a visible but an infinitesimal part of that abuse of the New Forest which is old and chronic, and operates always, and is common to the whole area, and, as things are, irremediable. To discover and denounce certain things which ought not to be, to rail against verderers, who are after all what they cannot help being, is about as profitable as it would be to "damn the nature of things."

It must be borne in mind that the Forest area has a considerable population composed of commoners, squatters, private owners, who have inherited or purchased lands originally filched from the Forest; and of a large number of persons who reside mostly in the villages, and are private residents, publicans, shopkeepers, and lodging-house keepers. All these people have one object in common--to get as much as they can out of the Forest. It is true that a large proportion of them, especially those who live in the villages, which are now rapidly increasing their populations, are supposed not to have any Forest rights; but they do as a fact get something out of it; and we may say that, generally, all the people in the Forest dine at one table, and all get a helping out of most of the dishes going, though the first and biggest helpings are for the favoured guests.

Those who have inherited rights have indeed come to look on the Forest as in a sense their property. What is given or handed over to them is not in their view their proper share: they take this openly, and get the balance the best way they can--in the dark generally. It is not dishonest to help yourself to what belongs to you; and they must live--must have their whack. They have, in fact, their own moral code, their New Forest conscience, just as other men--miners, labourers on the land, tradesmen, gamekeepers, members of the Stock Exchange, for instance--have each their corporate code and conscience. It may not be the general or the ideal or speculative conscience, but it is what may be called their working conscience. One proof that much goes on in the dark, or that much is winked at, is the paucity of all wild life which is worth any man's while to take in a district where pretty well everything is protected on paper. Game, furred and feathered, would not exist at all but for the private estates scattered through the Forest, in which game is preserved, and from which the depleted Forest lands are constantly being restocked. Again, in all this most favourable country no rare or beautiful species may be found: it would be safer for the hobby, the golden oriole, the hoopoe, the harrier, to nest in a metropolitan park than in the loneliest wood between the Avon and Southampton Water. To introduce any new species, from the biggest--the capercailzie and the great bustard--to the smallest quail, or any small passerine bird with a spot of brilliant colour on its plumage, would be impossible.

The New Forest people are, in fact, just what circumstances have made them. Like all organised beings, they are the creatures of, and subject to, the conditions they exist in; and they cannot be other than they are--namely, parasites on the Forest. And, what is more, they cannot be educated, or preached, or worried out of their ingrained parasitical habits and ways of thought. They have had centuries--long centuries--of practice to make them cunning, and the effect of more stringent regulations than those now in use would only be to polish and put a better edge on that weapon which Nature has given them to fight with.

This being the conclusion, namely, that "things are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be," some of my readers, especially those in the New Forest, may ask, Why, then, say anything about it? why not follow the others who have written books and books and books about the New Forest, books big and books little, from Wise, his classic, and the Victoria History, down to the long row of little rosy guide-books? They saw nothing of all this; or if they saw un-pleasant things they thought it better to hold their tongues, or pens, than to make people uncomfortable.

I confess it would be a mistake, a mere waste of words, to bring these hidden things to light if it could be believed that the New Forest, in its condition and management, will continue for any length of time to be what it is and has been--just that and nothing more. A district in England, it is true, but out of the way, remote, a spot to be visited once or twice in a lifetime just to look at the scenery, like Lundy or the Scilly Isles or the Orkneys. But it cannot be believed. The place itself, its curious tangle of ownership--government by and rights of the crown, of private owners, commoners, and the public--is what it has always been; but many persons have now come to think and to believe that the time is approaching when there will be a disentanglement and a change.

The Forest has been known and loved by a limited number of persons always; the general public have only discovered it in recent years. For one visitor twenty years ago there are scores, probably hundreds, to-day. And year by year, as motoring becomes more common, and as cycling from being general grows, as it will, to be universal, the flow of visitors to the Forest will go on at an ever-increasing rate, and the hundreds of to-day will be thousands in five years' time. With these modern means of locomotion, there is no more attractive spot than this hundred and fifty square miles of level country which contains the most beautiful forest scenery in England. And as it grows in favour in all the country as a place of recreation and refreshment, the subject of its condition and management, and the ways of its inhabitants, will receive an increased attention. The desire will grow that it shall not be spoilt, either by the authorities or the residents, that it shall not be turned into townships and plantations, nor be starved, nor its wild life left to be taken and destroyed by anyone and everyone. It will be seen that the "rights" I have spoken of, with the unwritten laws and customs which are kept more or less in the dark, are in conflict with the better and infinitely more important rights of the people generally--of the whole nation. Once all this becomes common knowledge, that which some now regard as a mere dream, a faint hope, something too remote for us to concern ourselves about, will all at once appear to us as a practical object--something to be won by fighting, and certainly worth fighting for.

It may be said at once, and I fancy that anyone who knows the inner life of the Forest people will agree with me, that so long as these are in possession there can be no great change, no permanent improvement made in the Forest. That is the difficulty, but it is not an insuperable one. Public opinion, and the desire of the people for anything, is a considerable force to-day; so that, inspired by it, the most timid and conservative governments are apt all at once to acquire an extraordinary courage. Sustained by that outside force, the most tender-hearted and sensitive Prime Minister would not in the least mind if some persons were to dub him a second and worse William the Bastard.

The people in this district have a curious experiment to show the wonderful power of the Forest fly in retaining its grasp. A man takes the fly between his finger and thumb, and with the other hand holds a single hair of a cow or horse for it to seize, then gently pulls hair and fly apart. The fly does not release his hold--he splits the hair, or at any rate shaves a piece off right down to the fine end with his sharp, grasping claw. Doubtless the human parasite will, when his time comes, show an equal tenacity; he will embrace the biggest and oldest oak he knows, and to pluck him from his beloved soil it will be necessary to pull up the tree by its roots. But this is a detail, and may be left to the engineers.

Beyond that starved, melancholy wilderness, the sight of which has led me into so long a digression, one comes to a point which overlooks the valley of the Exe; and here one pauses long before going down to the half-hidden village by the river. Especially if it is in May or June, when the oak is in its "glad light grene," for that is the most vivid and beautiful of all vegetable greens, and the prospect is the greenest and most soul-refreshing to be found in England. The valley is all wooded and the wood is all oak--a continuous oak-wood stretching away on the right, mile on mile, to the sea. The sensation experienced at the sight of this prospect is like that of the traveller in a dry desert when he comes to a clear running stream and drinks his fill of water and is refreshed. The river is tidal, and at the full of the tide in its widest part beside the village its appearance is of a small inland lake, grown round with oaks--old trees that stretch their horizontal branches far out and wet their lower leaves in the salt water. The village itself that has this setting, with its ancient watermill, its palace of the Montagus, and the Abbey of Beaulieu, a grey ivied ruin, has a distinction above all Hampshire villages, and is unlike all others in its austere beauty and atmosphere of old-world seclusion and quietude. Above all is that quality which the mind imparts--the expression due to romantic historical associations.

One very still, warm summer afternoon I stood on the margin, looking across the sheet of glassy water at a heron on the farther side, standing knee-deep in the shallow water patiently watching for a fish, his grey figure showing distinctly against a background of bright green sedges. Between me and the heron scores of swallows and martins were hawking for flies, gliding hither and thither a little above the glassy surface, and occasionally dropping down to dip and wet their under plumage in the water. And all at once, fifty yards out from the margin, there was a great splash, as if a big stone had been flung out into the lake; and then two or three moments later out from the falling spray and rocking water rose a swallow, struggling laboriously up, its plumage drenched, and flew slowly away. A big pike had dashed at and tried to seize it at the moment of dipping in the water, and the swallow had escaped as by a miracle. I turned round to see if any person was near, who might by chance have witnessed so strange a thing, in order to speak to him about it. There was no person within sight, but if on turning round my eyes had encountered the form of a Cistercian monk, returning from his day's labour in the fields, in his dirty black-and-white robe, his implements on his shoulders, his face and hands begrimed with dust and sweat, the apparition on that day, in the mood I was in, would not have greatly surprised me.

The atmosphere, the expression of the past may so attune the mind as almost to produce the illusion that the past is now.

But more than old memories, great as their power over the mind is at certain impressible moments, and more than Beaulieu as a place where men dwell, is that ineffable freshness of nature, that verdure that like the sunlight and the warmth of the sun penetrates to the inmost being. Here I have remembered the old ornithologist Willughby's suggestion, which no longer seemed fantastic, that the furred and feathered creatures inhabiting arctic regions have grown white by force of imagination and the constant intuition of snow. And here too I have recalled that modern fancy that the soul in man has its proper shape and colour, and have thought that if I came hither with a grey or blue or orange or brown soul, its colour had now changed to green. The pleasure of it has detained me long days in spring, often straying by the river at its full, among the broadly-branching oaks, delighting my sight with the new leaves

against the sun shene, Some very red, and some a glad light grene.

It may be observed that we must be out and well away from the woods and have a wide horizon all around in order to feel the sun flowing through us. Many of us have experienced these "divine raptures," this sublimated state of feeling; and such moments are perhaps the best in our earthly lives; but it is mainly the Trahernes, the Silurist Vaughans, the Newmans, the Frederic Myers, the Coventry Patmores, the Wordsworths, that speak of them, since such moods best fit, or can be made to fit in with their philosophy, or mysticism, and are, to them, its best justification.

This wide heath, east of Beaulieu, stretching miles away towards Southampton Water, looks level to the eye. But it is not so; it is grooved with long valley-like depressions with marshy or boggy bottoms, all draining into small tributaries of the Dark Water, which flows into the Solent near Lepe. In these bottoms and in all the wet places the heather and furze mixes with or gives place to the bog myrtle, or golden withy; and on the spongiest spots the fragrant yellow stars of the bog asphodel are common in June. These spots are exceedingly rich in colour, with greys and emerald greens and orange yellows of moss and lichen, flecked with the snow-white of cotton-grass.

Here, then, besides that cause of contentment which we find in openness, there is fragrance in fuller measure than in most places. One may wade through acres of myrtle, until that subtle delightful odour is in one's skin and clothes, and in the air one breathes, and seems at last to penetrate and saturate the whole being, and smell seems to be for a time the most important of the senses.

Among the interesting birds that breed on the heath, the nightjar is one of the commonest. A keen naturalist, Mr. E. A. Bankes, who lived close by, told me that he had marked the spot where he had found a pair of young birds, and that each time he rode over the heath he had a look at them, and as they remained there until able to fly, he concluded that it is not true that the parent birds remove the young when the nest has been discovered.

I was not convinced, as it did not appear that he had handled the young birds: he had only looked at them while sitting on his horse. The following summer I found a pair of young not far from the same spot: they were half-fledged and very active, running into the heath and trying to hide from me, but I caught and handled them for some minutes, the parent bird remaining near, uttering her cries. I marked the spot and went back next day, only to find that the birds had vanished.

The snipe, too, is an annual breeder, and from what I saw of it on the heath I think we have yet something to learn concerning the breeding habits of that much-observed bird. The parent bird is not so wise as most mothers of the feathered world, since her startling cry of alarm, sounding in a small way like the snort of a frightened horse, will attract a person to the spot where she is sheltering her young among the myrtle. She will repeat the cry at intervals a dozen times without stirring or attempting to conceal the young. But she does not always act in the same way. Sometimes she has risen to a great height and begun circling above me, the circles growing smaller or larger as I came nearer or went farther from the spot where the young were lurking.

It was until recently a moot question as to whether or not the female snipe made the drumming or bleating sound; some of the authorities say that this sound proceeds only from the male bird. I have no doubt that both birds make the sound. Invariably when I disturbed a snipe with young, and when she mounted high in the air, to wheel round and round, uttering her anxious cries, she dashed downwards at intervals, and produced the bleating or drumming which the male birds emit when playing about the sky.

In all cases where I have found young snipe there was but one old bird, the female, no doubt. In some instances I have spent an hour with the young birds by me, or in my hands, waiting for the other parent to appear; and I am almost convinced that the care of the young falls wholly on the female.

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