y and among the old loose slates.
On every stercoraceous deposit on coach, cart, or bridle road, they
were busy on grain and pulse; and, in spite of cur and cat, legions
embrowned every cottage garden. Emigration itself in many million
families would have left no perceptible void; and the inexterminable
multitude would have laughed at the Plague.

The other small birds of the parish began to feel their security from
our shot, and sung their best, unscared on hedge, bush, and tree.
Perhaps, too, for sake of their own sweet strains, we spared the lyrists
of Scotland, the linnet and the lark, the one in the yellow broom, the
other beneath the rosy cloud--while there was ever a sevenfold red
shield before Robin's breast, whether flitting silent as a falling leaf,
or trilling his autumnal lay on the rigging or pointed gable-end of barn
or byre. Now and then the large bunting, conspicuous on a top-twig, and
proud of his rustic psalmody, tempted his own doom--or the cunning
stone-chat, glancing about the old dykes, usually shot at in vain--or
yellow-hammer, under the ban of the national superstition, with a drop
of the devil's blood beneath his pretty crest, pretty in spite of that
cruel creed--or green-finch, too rich in plumage for his poorer song--or
shilfa, the beautiful nest-builder, shivering his white-plumed wings in
shade and sunshine, in joy the most rapturous, in grief the most
despairing of all the creatures of the air--or redpole, balanced on the
down of the thistle or flower of the bunweed on the old clovery lea--or,
haply twice seen in a season, the very goldfinch himself, a radiant and
gorgeous spirit brought on the breeze from afar, and worthy, if only
slightly wounded, of being enclosed within a silver cage from Fairy
Land.

But we waxed more ambitious as we grew old--and then woe to the rookery
on the elm-tree grove! Down dropt the dark denizens in dozens,
rebounding with a thud and a skraigh from the velvet moss, which under
that umbrage formed firm floor for Titania's feet--while others kept
dangling dead or dying by the claws, cheating the crusted pie, and all
the blue skies above were intercepted by cawing clouds of distracted
parents, now dipping down in despair almost within shot, and now, as if
sick of this world, soaring away up into the very heavens, and
disappearing to return no more--till sunset should bring silence, and
the night air roll off the horrid smell of sulphur from the desolated
bowers