ibility. My own
vision, by the way, is reasonably good, if I may say so; at any rate I
am not stone-blind. Yet here have I been perambulating the Public Garden
for an indefinite period, without seeing the first trace of a
field-mouse or a shrew. I should have been in excellent company had I
begun long ago to maintain that no such animals exist within our
precincts. But the other day a butcher-bird made us a flying call, and
almost the first thing he did was to catch one of these same furry
dainties and spit it upon a thorn, where anon I found him devouring it.
I would not appear to boast; but really, when I saw what Collurio had
done, it did not so much as occur to me to quarrel with him because he
had discovered in half an hour what I had overlooked for ten years. On
the contrary I hastened to pay him a heart-felt compliment upon his
indisputable sagacity and keenness as a natural historian;--a measure of
magnanimity easily enough afforded, since however the shrike might excel
me at one point, there could be no question on the whole of my
immeasurable superiority. And I cherish the hope that my fellow
townsmen, who, as they insist, never themselves see any birds whatever
in the Garden and Common (their attention being taken up with matters
more important), may be disposed to exercise a similar forbearance
toward me, when I modestly profess that within the last seven or eight
years I have watched there some thousands of specimens, representing not
far from seventy species.

Of course the principal part of all the birds to be found in such a
place are transient visitors merely. In the long spring and autumn
journeys it will all the time be happening that more or less of the
travelers alight here for rest and refreshment. Now it is only a
straggler or two; now a considerable flock of some one species; and now
a miscellaneous collection of perhaps a dozen sorts.

One of the first things to strike the observer is the uniformity with
which such pilgrims arrive during the night. He goes his rounds late in
the afternoon, and there is, no sign of anything unusual; but the next
morning the grounds are populous,--thrushes, finches, warblers, and what
not. And as they come in the dark, so also do they go away again. With
rare exceptions you may follow them up never so closely, and they will
do nothing more than fly from tree to tree, or out of one clump of
shrubbery into another. Once in a great while, under some special
provoca