hire, because it corroborates my discovery,
which I made many years ago, of the same sort, on a sunny sandbank near
Farnham, in Surrey. I am well acquainted with the South Hams of
Devonshire, and can suppose that district, from its southerly situation,
to be a proper habitation for such animals in their best colours.

Since the ring-ousels of your vast mountains do certainly not forsake
them against winter, our suspicions that those which visit this
neighbourhood about Michaelmas are not English birds, but driven from the
more northern parts of Europe by the frosts, are still more reasonable;
and it will be worth your pains to endeavour to trace from whence they
come, and to inquire why they make so very short a stay.

In your account of your error with regard to the two species of herons,
you incidentally gave me great entertainment in your description of the
heronry at Cressi Hall, which is a curiosity I never could manage to see.
Fourscore nests of such a bird on one tree is a rarity which I would ride
half as many miles to have a sight of. Pray be sure to tell me in your
next whose seat Cressi Hall is, and near what town it lies. I have often
thought that those vast extents of fens have never been sufficiently
explored. If half a dozen gentlemen, furnished with a good strength of
water-spaniels, were to beat them over for a week, they would certainly
find more species.

There is no bird, I believe, whose manners I have studied more than that
of the _caprimulgus_ (the goat-sucker), as it is a wonderful and curious
creature; but I have always found that though sometimes it may chatter as
it flies, as I know it does, yet in general it utters its jarring note
sitting on a bough; and I have for many a half hour watched it as it sat
with its under mandible quivering, and particularly this summer. It
perches usually on a bare twig, with its head lower than its tail, in an
attitude well expressed by your draughtsman in the folio "British
Zoology." This bird is most punctual in beginning its song exactly at
the close of day--so exactly that I have known it strike up more than
once or twice just at the report of the Portsmouth evening gun, which we
can hear when the weather is still. It appears to me past all doubt that
its notes are formed by organic impulse, by the powers of the parts of
its windpipe formed for sound, just as cats purr. You will credit me, I
hope, when I assure you that, as my neighbours were assem