between two and three feet deep. His motion through water is slow, but his carriage is stately. I have seen him fell a rat by one blow on the back of the head, when the rat was munching at his dish of fish."

According to Æsop, the heron's food in his time was very different from what it is now; for when he invited the fox to dinner he provided a jar of minced-meat for himself. The nests are of sticks, the sheep contributing a lining of wool; in it three or four bluishgreen eggs are laid, which are hatched towards the end of March. For three months afterwards great excitement, incident upon the young ones learning to fly, pervades the heronry. Like many children, they are unwilling to go to sleep at night, and frequently chatter and croak to a later hour than others of the feathered race. I once fired a gun under the trees when the herons were putting their children to bed, and the tumult which immediately followed was not soon forgotten.

In some parts of France sheds are provided for herons to build in-usually by the side of a running stream where fish abound. Their babies pay rent for the accommodation thus provided, being sold to gratify the palate of the noblesse, by whom they are considered a great delicacy.

The Heron's Haunt' was amongst the pictures of the Royal Academy in 1862, and is described as "A reedy pool, over which the purple evening mists are rolling, with profuse growth of docks and sedges on its margin, and girt by willows and poplars, standing in outline against a red sunset sky.”

I have seen the heron in Bermuda, and shortly before I quitted the islands a brother officer shot one; he did not differ from the English species, and was probably well advanced in years, as he had a handsome grey fringe of delicate feathers round his throat; and I heard, moreover, that it was some years since any had fallen to the sportsman.

BIRD MURDER.

WITHIN the last two or three years more than ordinary interest has been felt on the subject of that small feathered game, which, being without the pale of the game laws, is supposed to be anybody and everybody's property. Public attention has been called to the matter, both in our own country and on the continent, and in France active measures have been taken to put a stop to the destruction of small birds, in the hope of thereby also putting an end to the growing deterioration of the crops which their destruction occasions. For it has at length been discovered, by close and longcontinued observation, that wherever the little birds are killed off, there the land fails in productiveness. No matter what the crops may be whether corn, grain, turnips, beet-root, grapes, or fruits of any kind—if the small birds have been shot down or driven away, there the produce of the land fails, and fails almost in the exact ratio of the destruction among the birds. It has even been found that in some places where the small birds have been utterly exterminated, and not so much as the chirp of a sparrow is heard from one month's end to another, the land is not worth cultivating, the seed being either destroyed in the ground by slugs and worms, or the young plants devoured by myriads of insects, before they acquire any value. Among ourselves the subject has been taken up by the leading journals, and again and again the importance of preventing the persecution of small birds has been urged upon the agriculturist and all whom it may concern. To a large section of readers this earnest appeal comes with an aspect of entire novelty, and impresses them with the idea that the writers are making much ado about a trifling matter; but in sober truth the matter is serious enough, and nothing but the general ignorance with regard to it,

which has up to a late period prevailed, could excuse the gross neglect which it has received. We propose in the present paper to glance briefly at the systematic persecution of certain tribes of the small birds, and thus to enable the reader to judge what may be the probable effect of the extermination of their multitudes, as it regards the soil and its vegetable products.

The ortolan is a small bird, not larger than a sparrow, having a plumage of varied grey, brown, and black, with touches of a yellowish green. It is rarely seen alive in England, unless it be in Leadenhall Market, whither it is sent from the Continent in cages containing some quarter of a hundred each. Its favourite haunts are the vineyards in the vine-growing countries, and it makes its appearance in swarms among the vines, just as the fruit buds are blossoming, about the middle of April. Its nest is a hole in the ground, lined with something soft, and here it brings up two or three families of four to six young ones between the months of April and September. The sole food of the ortolans are the insects and grubs of various kinds which infest the vine; and one would think that the protection they thus afford the grape crop would ensure them immunity from human foes. But so far is this from being the case, that no sooner is the breeding-season over, than hundreds of fowlers set to work with their nets, and the useful little birds are caught alive by tens of thousands, in order to furnish a dish for the epicure. When first caught, they weigh, on an average, an ounce and a half each; but to prepare them for the market, they are shut up in chambers nearly dark, and fed with a paste of bruised grain and water, by which their weight is doubled in the course of a few weeks, when they are killed, and sent packed in barrels to the markets of Pairs. We have seen, of late years, an immense demand for ortolans among the purveyors of festal banquets, both at home and abroad; we have also heard dismal complaints of the ravages of the grape disease among the vines; and observers are

not wanting who declare that there is a close connection between the destruction of the bird and the disease of the vine.

But the French peasant wages war not only against the ortolans; he kills almost every bird that flies. Enter the market of any of the provincial towns about the period when summer is drawing to a close, and one of the first things that will strike you is the multitudes of small birds heaped in piles for sale. Though among them there is to be found almost every namable specimen, they are classed in the market only under two heads, grosses bêtes and petites bêtes; the grosses bétes are such as blackbirds, thrushes, with perhaps a few plump larks and a stray ouzel or two; while the petites bêtes comprise every other little bird to be found in the neighbouring territory-linnets, bullfinches, siskins, larks, redstarts, goldfinches, robins, tits, and hedge and house-sparrows, &c., &c. At this season everybody hunts this small game-bringing down the flocks with dust shot, liming the trees and wayside fences, and setting countless traps in the forest. The poor minikin victims form the diet of the labouring and lower middle classes of the towns and villages during the autumnal months, and if you walk through their streets at that season you tread on a carpet of the feathers of song-birds, and see the women and children sitting at their open doors, plucking them by thousands, and with a dexterity which could only be acquired by years of practice. The price of the "little cattle" in the market used to be five sous, or twopence halfpenny the dozen-the "big cattle" fetching rather more than twice that sum. Of late, however, we hear of the price being enhanced, while the birds are less plentiful.

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The wheatear, so well known to the pedestrian on our breezy downs—the dark-feathered bird with the bright white tail, who flies before him, then stops till he comes near, then flies off again, and so keeps company with him for a mile or more-this agreeable comrade of the green waste, being as savoury as he is shy, is

sacrificed for his ounce of flesh to the appetites of the gentry. He visits this country about the end of March, and comes in a rather starved condition. The hen lays five or six pale-green eggs, and rears her family on some waste warren, quarry, or hill side. They are mature and strong about the beginning of August, and then vast tribes of them assemble on the high open downs near the sea and prepare for migration. It is at this season they are caught, and it is the shepherds principally, who have charge of the woolly flocks on the broad downs, who catch them. The wheatear is a remarkably timid bird, and when alarmed, instead of flying away to a distance, will seek for the nearest covert that presents itself, and there lie concealed. The shepherds turn this instinct to their profit. Cutting small holes in the soil, they cover these with the upturned sod laid crossways, so that a corner is left for entrance; at the entrance hole they adjust a horsehair noose fastened to a stick thrust into the ground. They know well enough now to alarm the birds when any are near, and the silly creatures meet their doom where they looked for a refuge from danger. The birds are always fat when caught, and, being prized as dainties by the visitors at watering-places, generally fetch a good price, though a dozen of them would hardly satisfy a healthy appetite.

But with us it is the skylark, more than any other of the small birds, who is singled out for destruction. Although the skylark is our most brilliant songster, and sings to us more than eight months in the year, he is yet shot down in myriads during the winter months, and dressed for the table. During the summer season the larks live in comparative solitude, rearing their broods, of which a single pair will sometimes have four in a year. When the cold weather sets in they begin to unite in flocks, and the longer the cold endures the larger are their assemblies—a fact which is supposed to be due in part to the arrival of large flocks from the Continent at the cold season. When the ground is thinly sprinkled with snow,