snakes than birds.

"Then about the Dippers: they 'fly' to the bottom of a stream, using
their wings, just as they would fly up into the air; and there is the
same difficulty in flying to the bottom of the stream, and keeping
there, as there would be in flying up into the air, and keeping
there,--perhaps greater difficulty.

"They can never walk comfortably along the bottom of a river, as they
could on the bank, though I know they are often talked of as doing it.
They too, no doubt, empty their air-bags, to make going under water a
little less difficult."

155. This most valuable letter, for once, leaves me a minute or two,
disposed to ask a question which would need the skinning of a bird in a
diagram to answer--about the "air-passages, which are a kind of
supplementary lungs." Thinking better of it, and leaving the bird to
breathe in its own way, I _do_ wish we could get this Dipper question
settled,--for here we are all at sea--or at least at brook, again,
about it: and although in a book I ought to have examined before--Mr.
Robert Gray's 'Birds of the West of Scotland,' which contains a
quantity of useful and amusing things, and some plates remarkable for
the delicate and spirited action of birds in groups,--although, I say,
this unusually well-gathered and well-written book has a nice little
lithograph of two dippers, and says they are quite universally
distributed in Scotland, and called 'Water Crows,' and in Gaelic 'Gobha
dubh nan allt,' (which I'm sure must mean something nice, if one knew
what,) and though it has a lively account of the bird's ways out of the
water--says not a word of its ways _in_ it! except that "dippers
everywhere delight in _deep_ linns and brawling rapids, where their
interesting motions never fail to attract the angler and bird-student;"
and this of their voices: "In early spring, the male birds may be seen
perched on some moss-covered stone, trilling their fine clear notes;"
and again: "I have stood within a few yards of one at the close of a
blustering winter's day, and enjoyed its charming music unobserved. The
performer was sitting on a stake jutting from a mill-pond in the midst
of a cold and cheerless Forfarshire moor, yet he joyously warbled his
evening hymn with a fullness which made me forget the surrounding
sterility."

Forget it not, thou, good reader; but rather remember it in your own
hymns, and your own prayers, that still--in Bonnie Scotland, and Old
England--the voice