of England was in a garden
attached to a cafe in Trebizond, where, hopping round my chair and
picking up crumbs, it made me feel curiously at home. Similar treatment
of other wild birds would in time produce the same result, and even the
suspicious starling and stand-off rook might be taught to forget their
fear of us. The robin, feeding less on fruit and grain than on worms and
insects, has not made an enemy of the farmer or gardener. The common,
too common, sparrow, is another fearless neighbour, but its freedom
from persecution, of late somewhat threatened by Sparrow Clubs, is due
less to affection than to the futility of making any impression on such
hordes as infest our streets.

No act of the robin's more forcibly illustrates its trust in man than
the manner in which, at a season when all animals are abnormally shy and
suspicious, it makes its nest not only near our dwellings, but actually
in many cases under the same roof as ourselves. Letterboxes, flowerpots,
old boots, and bookshelves have all done duty, and I even remember a
pair of robins, many years ago in Kent, bringing up two broods in an old
rat trap which, fortunately too rusty to act, was still set and baited
with a withered piece of bacon. Pages might be filled with the mere
enumeration of curious and eccentric nesting sites chosen by this
fearless bird, but a single proof of its indifference to the presence of
man during the time of incubation may be cited from the MS. notebooks of
the second Earl of Malmesbury, which I have read in the library at Heron
Court. It seems that, while the east wing of that pleasant mansion was
being built, a pair of robins, having successfully brought up one family
in one of the unfinished rooms, actually reared a second brood in a hole
made for a scaffold-pole, though the sitting bird, being immediately
beneath a plank on which the plasterers stood at work, was repeatedly
splashed with mortar! The egg of the robin is subject to considerable
variety of type. I think it was the late Lord Lilford who, speaking on
the subject of a Bill for the protection of wild birds' eggs, then
before the House of Lords, gave it as his belief that no ornithologist
of repute would swear to the name of a single British bird's egg without
positively seeing one or other of the parent birds fly off the nest.
This was, perhaps, a little overstating the difficulty of evidence,
since any schoolboy with a fancy for birds-nesting might without
hesi