IT is easy, taking a score of birds, to construct a bird-calendar, a zodiac of birds, that comes very near the actual truths, and almost exhausts the list of more notable land-fowl. There are some, like the heron or the bittern, the curlew, the woodpecker, or the coot, that are not significant of any particular time and season, because they are not sufficiently familiar.

It is only by some fortunate accident and in particular places that you may hear the lonely cry of

or the bittern

It is a very quaint and ancient myth that the “mire-dromble” or “mere-drum” fixed its beak in a hollow reed or in the bog, and by “snoring,” “booming,” or “bellowing” through it made, as Burns says, “the quagmire reel.” Several poets refer to the bittern “shaking the solid ground,” Thomson among them, in the absurd lines, “The bittern knows his time, with bill ingulpht, to shake the surrounding marsh.” But they are all to be traced back to Michael Drayton’s description of how

It is altogether a delightful bird in poetry and folk-lore, this “bog-bumper” or “betowre,” or whatever name we choose to know it by. The curlew again, a bird of the coast and the northern uplands, is familiar only to those who live near marsh and moor, though its weird, wild clamour, as it passes overhead in the night, is the source of a superstition, which, as “Gabriel’s hounds,” “The Seven Whistlers,” “The Wild Huntsman,” is common to all Northern Europe, and is probably the origin of that fearful wild-fowl that was the “trump of doleful drere,” “the whistler shrill that whoso hears doth die,” to which Wordsworth alludes:

and Moore:

All this, and ever so much more of quaint and interesting tradition, has its source in the impressive uncanny cries with which the curlews, flying by night, keep their company all safely together. The woodpecker again, Tennyson’s “garnet-headed yaffingale,” the bird of Picus the augur, which breaks with his crazy ringing laugh so suddenly upon the solitude, is familiar only to those who live near woods. Marvel has some excellent but little-known lines on the “hewel,” as he calls this bird of many aliases:

The coot, too, is a bird only familiar to such as dwell near quiet waters—a whimsical and odd-mannered amphibian, that gives a very pleasing animation to the sequestered places it frequents, for whether diving and ducking in the water, or moving with flicking tail about the banks, in that “jerky, high-stepping manner” which Dudley Warner disliked so delightfully in his neighbours’ hens, it is a fowl of pantomimic behaviour that is very diverting to watch.

Other birds, again, are too common to be significant of time or of season, though, among them are many of the most popular of our feathered folk—the beautiful and merry chaffinch, the roadside yellowhammer, the linnets that are everywhere, the delightful goldfinch and bullfinch, the sweet-song hedge-sparrow, the handsome monotonous greenfinch, the ubiquitous sparrow—“meanest of the feathered race,” as Cowper unkindly calls it—and the dainty water-wagtails that

everybody likes. Some of the wagtails stay with us all the year round, but most move southward as winter approaches, and when the weather becomes severe, cross the Channel to seek a warmer climate. In Spring they are one of the ploughman’s companions, for often it is only in the freshly-turned furrows that they can then find the insect food they need, but later on they seek the neighbourhood of water where winged things assemble, and there love to paddle in the shallows. Often, too, they take flights inland, searching the meadows and garden-lawns for “such small deer” as they live upon, hawking for flies among the haycocks or amongst the cattle that are standing at ease by the pond, or following them in quest of the insects which, as they graze, they disturb from the herbage. I know no bird that is more “bird-like” than the wagtail; more dainty, delicate, and elegant: in its every movement it is airy, the embodiment of buoyant grace: whether on the ground or a-wing it is fairy-like, volatile, and wayward: running, fluttering, and flitting impulsively as if it were too happy to stop to think, like a child in a meadow full of flowers: a sylph among the birds, so slim and so sweetly-proportioned as to make its little companions look burly and thick-set: so prettily timid in its demeanour that the rest seem almost aggressive; in a word, a bird of birds.

But between the familiar and unfamiliar there are just enough birds, well known to all of us, that fit the seasons and the months with a rather special appropriateness. For the months there is the fieldfare for January, the rook for February, the thrush for March, the swallow for April, the nightingale for May, the dove for June, the kingfisher for July, the grouse for August, the partridge for September, the pheasant for October, the woodcock for November, and “the wren, the wren, the king o’ the birds,” for December.

The fieldfares comes to us late in the year, and in January, if the weather be very hard, are often the most conspicuous wild birds of the month. Most people mistake them for missel-thrushes, as they travel about in companies over the snow-covered fields, ransacking the hedges in such methodical fashion for the hawthorn berries, or scattering over open patches of ground in quest of seeds or insects. This mistake, doubtless, saves many of their lives, for those who would not shoot our native missel-thrushes in the snow, might have no compunction in bagging the strangers from abroad, who bring with them such a reputation for the table as the fieldfares, and who, it might be urged, are poaching on the scanty winter-provisions of thrush and blackbird—“the hawthorn’s berries red, with which the fieldfare, wintry guest, is fed,” and which, if it had stayed at home, would help to keep our own song-birds alive through the pinch of the year.

In February the rooks have repossessed themselves of their old haunts:

And so to March and “the throstle with his note so true”; and April, when “the swallow knows her time, and on the vernal breezes wings her way, o’er mountain, plain, and far-extending seas, from Afric’s torrid sands to Britain’s shore, before the cuckoo”; and May, “with the darling of the Summer’s pride, fair Philomel,” “the dear good angel of the Spring, the nightingale,” and

With the swallow and the nightingale, many other birds “transmigrating come, unnumbered colonies on foreign wing, at Nature’s summons.”

From every quarter the aliens, if birds bred on British soil by British-born parents can be called such, converge upon our coasts, just as if England were the centre of a circle at which all the birds who spend the rest of the year upon its circumference congregate for the nesting season, reaching the same point at the same time, but travelling, each company, on a radius of its own.

I have often wondered that migration is not more often looked at through the other end of the telescope, and Great Britain called the “home,” for instance, of the nightingale. What makes “home” for a bird? Is it not the place where the nest is built and the young are reared? For the rest of the year the families travel “abroad,” returning “home” for all that makes life important and domestic. Their fixed addresses are in England, their names are in British directories as residing there. But their doctors will not let them winter “at home,” and so they have to go on to the Continent, or to even warmer latitudes, for the colder months of the year. I myself entertain, and often express, a grudge against the “migrants” for staying only so long as it is fine; but as often as I do so, my conscience reproaches me, for, after all, the nightingale shows its affection for its birthplace by coming back to it; and, “in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations,” remains a true-born English bird. What more could it do? It might certainly stay and freeze to death. But why should we expect nightingales to do more than we expect men and women to do? Which of us, if warned by doctors against the English winter and possessing the means to go abroad, would stop at home to die here, just to show that we are lovers of our country? So it would be quite in keeping with the sympathetic and kindly tendency of contemporary natural history, if we looked upon the birds when they come, as our own birds coming home, and when they go, as going abroad under the inexorable compulsion of health; if we welcomed them in Spring as returning fellow-countrymen, and bade them god-speed in Autumn, as delicate folk who would, if they could, but dare not, stop in Britain all the year round. And who can blame the birds, apart from necessities of life and death, for leaving our shores? Think of the climate they can always, by a morning’s flight, enjoy, year in and year out, “in foreign countries”; what range of space, what perennial abundance of food, and then calculate the force of inherited affection for the place of their birth that urges them, hosts of little feeble people, to dare the appalling journey “home,” to risk the truly awful perils of return to their native land. Had they human intelligence, and did they live by reason, not one of them would think of coming here.

What human parents would think of wintering in, say, Cairo, if they knew that the railway companies meant to destroy them wholesale as they travelled down to Dover; that the coast-guard and along-shore rabble were all on the look-out for them to take their lives; that the Channel steamer owners were in conspiracy to kill them; that the quays at Calais were swarming with avowed murderers of British travellers; that every Continental line was run by bandits and brigands sworn to shed their blood, and every hotel and resting-place an ambush of assassins? What British pater-familias would “winter in Cairo” under such conditions of travel? Yet these are the conditions under which the nightingales come and go. Only they do not know it. If they did, “the instinct of self-preservation” would surely triumph over “love of country,” and we should never see any nightingales in England, nor any turtle-doves—one of the most beautiful of our birds. But more of turtle-doves by-and-by.

Their larger and more beautiful relative the ring-dove or wood-pigeon we have with us always, and I think it is conspicuously the bird of June. The young are then on the wing, and it is impossible, passing near their haunts, not to be attracted by this ornamental bird, which, whether flying or at rest, adds a grace to every scene. Above all, it is beautiful when it beats its way up into the air to a height, and then, expanding its wings, comes floating down again. This exquisite performance may be seen at almost any time, for the ring-dove sometimes has three broods in the year, and if, as is supposed, it is a part of the bird’s courtship, is as appropriate in October as in March. Both birds may sometimes be seen executing this graceful “manoeuvre” together; and it is, I think, the most prettily significant of all bird-gestures. Throughout June may be heard “the deep mellow crush of the wood-pigeon’s note, making music that sweetens the calm” of the summer woodlands or the sudden clapping when the startled bird, “on loud-applauding wing,” quits its perch. Hardly a country walk can then be taken without seeing, either feeding on the ground, at rest, or on watch upon the trees or flying overhead, the handsome bird, in its plumage of lavender-blue, that seems so wild, and yet can be tamed sooner almost than any bird but the robin.

It is an odd fact that the civilised sparrow, the most coolly familiar of birds, is the most difficult to make tame. The fact is, it is naturally vulgar, and no gentle influences can ameliorate the naturally vulgar. When at liberty, it will take all the liberties it can and dares; when shut up, even if from the nest, it develops into a voracious idiot; never amenable to kindness, always ferocious for food.

Yet the wood-pigeon, one of the wildest and shyest of birds, will soon become tame, will feed from the hand, and when the miserable, suspicious sparrow rushes into hiding, will sit in the aviary unconcerned and confident of friendship.

But note this curious difference. The sparrow in an aviary will breed, lay its eggs, and bring up its young ones, without any difficulty. The ring-dove may walk about at nesting-time with twigs in its mouth, may lay eggs, but let the aviary be never so large, it will not hatch its eggs.

This contradiction in character is very extraordinary, and yet, if considered, there is no irregularity in it. The sparrow builds simply because it will build anywhere, and is accustomed to the neighbourhood of men. But it never becomes in the least friendly: never even lays aside a suspicion which would be unbecoming in a Central African finch. The ring-dove, on the other hand, recognises at once a benevolent intention, becomes quite tame, and yet, during the nesting-season, cannot accommodate itself to conditions so outrageous to its nature. For it loves to build its platform in the most secluded spots, not always far from human habitation, but as far as possible out of sight.

Again, in protecting its young, this timid bird becomes very bold. I remember taking a young cushat from a tree and trying to rear it by hand, but it was almost full-grown, well-feathered, and too old for the purpose. After two days’ very unsuccessful experiments, I took it out on the lawn in a basket, on the chance of its parents being about, and the result was certainly as surprising as it was unlooked-for. The young bird, when we had all retired, began to show signs of excitement, stretching its neck up, and looking all round it vaguely; then it perched on the rim of the basket, and thoroughly searched the tree-tops, and all of a sudden it either saw or heard something that we did not, for it brightened up, stretched its neck to the utmost, looking excitedly in a particular direction, and then flew its first flight, heavily, but straight, to the top of an arbour. Scarcely had its feet touched the roof when, as if by magic, one of the old birds appeared at its side and began at once to feed it. None of us stirred, and, as soon as the meal was finished, the old bird hopped up to an overhanging branch, the young one following, and so up into the tree, and from that one to the next, and the next, till, in a few minutes, it had travelled along the tree-tops a hundred yards away. Now, the old birds must have been waiting about the house all the two days, for it is hardly likely that the taking out of the young one on to the lawn could have accidentally coincided with the coming of the old one to the same spot.

However, it is a curious, and really baffling, commentary on the whole incident that thereafter two old wood-pigeons and a young one, before the household was up in the morning, and off and on during the day, used to come down upon the lawn and examine the spot where the captive’s basket had stood, and which, after the young bird’s flight, we had shaken out on the spot, scattering all the peas and food that was in it upon the grass. Every day a handful of crumbs or maize used to be thrown there, and every day the family came for it. By what process of “instinct” could wild birds be led to behave so unreasonably? Did they separate in their “minds” the incidents of capture and of release, and being unable to put one and one together, consider the latter as an isolated act of benevolence apart from, and quite unconnected with, the former, and so behave with gratitude in consequence? Did they look on us only as the good Jack Stout who pulled Pussy out, forgetting that we were also the naughty Tommy Green who put Pussy in? But the workings of “instinct” are not to be followed out by “reason,” or what shall we say of all the other birds who, until we find their nests, are full of artifice to mislead us, and apparently most anxious that their secret should not be known, but who, once their nest is found, appear to lose all concern about the matter, and move to and fro as if it were the most natural thing in the world to treat us with confidence and be thoroughly aboveboard with us?

Take the delightful dotterel, for instance. It will go through all the deceptive performances of a lapwing, and weary out your patience with anxious devices for leading you astray; and yet, when you at last discover its beautiful eggs, olive, with rich dark markings, or its downy little ones, almost the same colour as the eggs, cuddled together in a small hollow, the old birds seem almost to congratulate you upon your sagacity, and come close, as much as to say, “Yes, these are our eggs; we were trying to show them to you all the time; and this is the way we sit down on them. Like to see us catch a fly? There! That’s the way we do it. See us run.” Then they droop one wing and begin to flutter along the ground, as if hurt—just to show you how it is done; and, in fact, before you go (and over your going they unreservedly and unmistakably rejoice), will sometimes go through such a series of performances as justifies their proverbial reputation for semi-idiotcy:

This was written three centuries ago; but foolish or not, the dotterel is a very engaging little bird, and to those who live near its summer haunts one of the prettiest details of bird-life

in June. Long after dusk, its plaintive note can be heard, now here, now there, among the tussocked grass, as the birds reply to one another from their sleeping-places. And the mist comes creeping up on to the moorland from the reedy mere beyond, and in the distance may be heard the voices of the water-birds settling down for the night among the plumy sedges, where the grey heron, perched upon the skeleton of some water-logged boat, seems to act as timekeeper to the ducks and widgeon that live hard by, and are under orders to be “within doors” by nightfall.

Listening to the twilight voices of birds, the most notable by far, that which holds the attention longest, though it may not be the first to catch the ear, is the fern-owl, whirring to his mate as she hawks backwards and forwards over the undergrowth, and turning in the air as she flies with queer sweep of the wings. Where there is one pair there are generally more, and the sound seems continuous, one bird taking it up from the other, or more than one “churring” at the same time. No bird of its size performs more curious antics on the wing than the “nightjar” or “goatsucker,” and it is almost incredible that the creature, flapping and tumbling in such ungainly fashion through the air, when startled from its sleeping-place in the day-time, is the same that one sees sailing and sliding so gracefully after nightfall.I know a beautiful orchard where these birds haunt,

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—