domen, and from that
small opening had cunningly extracted all the meat. Though still alive
it was empty as a blown eggshell. Poor queen and mother, you survived
the winter in vain, and went abroad in vain in the bitter weather in
quest of bread to nourish your few first-born--the grubs that would
help you by and by; now there will be no bread for them, and for you no
populous city in the flowery earth and a great crowd of children to rise
up each day, when days are long, to call you blessed! And he who
did this thing, the unspeakable oxeye with his black and yellow
breast--"catanic black and amber"--even while I made my lamentation was
tinkling his merry song overhead in the windy elms.

The birds that lived on the huge cathedral itself had the greatest
attraction for me; and here the daws, if not the most numerous, were the
most noticeable, as they ever are on account of their conspicuousness in
their black plumage, their loquacity and everlasting restlessness. Far
up on the ledge from which the spire rises a kestrel had found a cosy
corner in which to establish himself, and one day when I was there a
number of daws took it on themselves to eject him: they gathered near
and flew this way and that, and cawed and cawed in anger, and swooped at
him, until he could stand their insults no longer, and, suddenly dashing
out, he struck and buffeted them right and left and sent them screaming
with fear in all directions. After this they left him in peace: they
had forgotten that he was a hawk, and that even the gentle mousing
wind-hover has a nobler spirit than any crow of them all.

On first coming to the cathedral I noticed a few pigeons sitting on the
roof and ledges very high up, and, not seeing them well, I assumed that
they were of the common or domestic kind. By and by one cooed, then
another; and recognizing the stock-dove note I began to look carefully,
and found that all the birds on the building--about thirty pairs--were
of this species. It was a great surprise, for though we occasionally
find a pair of stock-doves breeding on the ivied wall of some inhabited
mansion in the country, it was a new thing to find a considerable colony
of this shy woodland species established on a building in a town.
They lived and bred there just as the common pigeon--the vari-coloured
descendant of the blue rock--does on St. Paul's, the Law Courts, and the
British Museum in London. Only, unlike our metropolitan doves, both the
domesti