humanity, she was exquisitely considerate, meek, and sympathetic. Grande dame in her set, she was a sister of mercy to those beneath her. Her intellect was masculine-witness her clear and hard sketches of contemporary history-yet was she essentially feminine in the conclusions she drew from her premisses, and in the penetration displayed in her descriptions of character. Her memoirs will always be read, not only because they give us a vivid account of the times she lived in, but because they reveal to us, from the remarks and reflections interspersed throughout the book, the character of a genuine, accomplished, and high-minded woman. ALEX. CHARLES EWALD. 161 THE AMONG THE BIRDS. HE river flows to-day with a full stream, much discoloured by what fishermen call "snow-broth;" only a few catkins and much-swollen buds on the willows which skirt it tell of early spring. What birds may be expected to-day in the valley? The migratory birds generally arrive within a week on one side or other of the average date assigned by naturalists to their respective arrivals. A gleam of sunshine lights up this patch of king cups. There is a low fence beyond, running down to the willows; and since our floral dial tells unerringly by these vernal indications, as did Thoreau's, that the time must be towards the end of March, we are busily looking for the little willow-wren, which is among the earliest of our spring visitors. He who knows the spots in his neighbourhood which are most favoured by the migratory birds on their first arrival is seldom at a loss to find the birds themselves year by year. It is just as we thought. Down this old fence a willow-wren is actually flitting. Now it is on the hedge, now on the willow; ever moving, sometimes indulging in snatches of song; up and down it flies, very fearless, evidently much pleased to find itself in its old house again after the long journey from Khartoum, or even from the Holy Land, where the bird abounds. When this bird has once reached its familiar haunts in England it may be confidently asserted that spring is here. Soon the rest of the spring migrants will be with us-the swallows, redstarts, whitethroats, the nightingale and cuckoo, the goatsucker, and the very latest comer of all, the sober-coloured flycatcher, and nesting cares will begin apace. Hinc ille avium concentus in agris, Et lætæ pecudes, et ovantes gutture corvi. It is not often that the spring migratory birds are seen on their arrival. They come in the night, and forthwith scatter over the country. It is different with the autumnal immigration. We have stood on the chalk cliffs of Flamborough in October, and watched the Royston crows winging their heavy way by twos and threes in the afternoon over an illimitable waste of plunging grey seas to our shores. More curious is the arrival of the woodcocks, about the twentieth of November, on the dull, sandy coasts of Lincolnshire, near Donna Nook, a few miles south of Grimsby. These birds arrive in the night, but are much fatigued with their flight, although in excellent condition. They lie the day after their arrival under any hedgerow, or on the first grassy bank near the sea, scarcely able to rise on the wing until the next night, when they generally flutter up and pass inland to the moist woodlands and combes of the west. Gunners innumerable, and even boys with sticks, know from long experience the night on which the unhappy "cocks" will arrive, and are on the "fytties" (as the grassy strips of land by the sea are called) long before dawn. Then commences an indiscriminate fusillade. Thirty or forty are shot within the space of two or three miles, and the boys, aided by dogs, knock down the poor birds with their sticks, until, as in November 1885, woodcocks can be bought at sixpence each. We remember the servant of a clergyman, who lived near the coast, opening her master's front door early one morning to clean the steps, when she saw a woodcock on the gravel road in front of them, and dexterously flinging the brush which she carried, at once knocked the tired bird down and secured it. About the same time vast flights of our smallest British bird, the golden-crested wren, arrive night after night. There are certain tracts on the eastern coast—as, for instance, on the long sandy spit running from Holderness to the Spurn lighthouse-which are overrun by thickets of the seabuckthorn (Hippophaë rhamnoides), and these singular willow-like shrubs swarm with the little birds, like so many bees, morning after morning. The records of the Migration Committee, appointed by the British Association, are full of curious details respecting the arrival and departure of our migratory birds. If a glimpse is desired of them on their perilous voyage, Mr. H. Seebohm's "Siberia in Europe" (p. 242 et seq.) should be consulted. The reader can then somewhat understand the countless thousands of birds which often on a single night pass the lighthouse on Heligoland during their autumnal flight from the arctic regions: 15,000 larks have been caught on this little island in a single night. No more excellent chapter on the migration of birds has ever been written. Varied as is the bird-life of our gardens, and that seen on the edge of a wood in spring, with the different songs and cries and plumage and mode of flight of each species, the scene is as nothing to the prodigality of bird-life which may be found in certain clearings of tropical forests, in the Australian bush, and the like. Our birds are for the most part soberly clad, not aggressive, like the Indian kite or crow; not tricked out, as in the valley of the Amazon, in rainbow shades of beauty. And yet, like English scenery, if not very striking when compared with the birds of warmer latitudes, our birds are homely, and all the more beloved in consequence. How very remote from any associations of familiarity and love are, for instance, the birds of India! Even old residents never acquire much affection for them, partly because the climate represses enthusiastic feelings, and partly because they have suffered so much from the screams and the pilfering of the best known birds. Edwin Arnold recalls the birds of India in lines which savour of true poetry : the mynas perked and picked, The nine brown sisters chattered in the thorn, Herons appear to have increased of late years. They do great damage to trout streams, although the eel is said to be their favourite food. They seem to doze a good deal as they stand in the water, in the attitude in which artists have so frequently depicted them, so that the quiet observer may often draw near without detection. Great is then the commotion; the heron splashes off, laboriously gets on the wing, and sails slowly away, with its feet thrust behind and projecting far beyond the tail. Occasionally two or three herons perch in a tree at some little distance from water, but we have only once noticed a single bird sitting in a tree. Its ash-coloured plumage then rendered it very conspicuous. Many birds behave in a ludicrous fashion during their mating season. Jackdaws, ordinarily so restless and chattering, are completely sobered at the contemplation of the serious step they are about to take in choosing a mate. They may be seen sitting in pairs on weathercocks, the roofs of churches, or even the boughs of tall elms, in early spring; getting as close to each other as they can, like avadavats, and then neither cawing nor moving, as if the adorable one's perfections entirely annihilated their ordinary activity. At a certain age the shy human male often exhibits this jackdaw kind of love, and is entranced if he may but The Light of Asia, p. 20. gaze upon his lady's beauty. Very confiding are lapwings in their mating season. They leave the uplands, or the fields by the river, and draw near roads and habitations, preferring pastures to their ordinary haunts in arable fields. Here they are tolerably fearless as men and carriages pass by, in a fashion very different from their shy mood a fortnight ago, and run about erecting their beautiful crests, and showing off the sheen of their feathers to the greatest advantage. The love-making of the blackcock is a grotesque exaggeration of these antics, while the capercailzie has a regular spot on which to exhibit these Cyclops-like dances-his lek, as the Scandinavians call it-to an admiring circle of hens, both these birds being polygamous. Something of the same kind of gambols might have been seen on grassy platforms of the Lincolnshire fens in old days, when the ruff displayed his Elizabethan magnitude of collar to his attendant reeves. Those days, alas! are all but gone for ever, and the ruff in Britain is fast following the great auk, the kite, and the avocet to extinction. Early in spring the pretty wheatear comes to flirt its tail and flit gently onwards before the wayfarer, resting every twenty yards or so on a heap of stones, turf, and the like. This is the bird supposed to be alluded to by the Laureate as the "sea-blue bird of March." Though the wheatear does not exactly answer to this description, for the purposes of poetry the comparison is near enough; and it is difficult to say, if not the wheatear, what other bird the poet can intend. Multitudes of these birds were snared on the South Downs in old days by the shepherds when they arrived. In February this bird may be seen on the Maidan at Umballah, under the distant snow-clad peaks of the Himalayas. Often must it remind both the officers and soldiers who drill there of their far-distant homes. Thence the ornithologist can fancy its onward advance over the Hindoo Khoosh, past Herat, over the steppes to Russia; then along the shores of the Baltic, past Heligoland, and so to the pleasant country road here, where we see it daintily flying before us, by clumps of primroses and through the wafts of violet-odour under the hedges. What dangers from storm and cold and the claws of rapacious hawks has not this little bird lately overpassed in safety! How much would we not give for the skill of Helenus, who knew the language of all fowls that fly, and would have been able to gather from our migratory birds the story of their wanderings! Ulysses-like, each of them has seen the cities and manners of many men, escaped from sirens, and traversed pathless seas. On the Irish moors and in the West of England the curious short-eared owl (Otus brachyotus) appears to be a resident. Often, |