thousands of these birds may be seen feeding together, almost covering the soil. The lark-shooter does not fire at them as they feed, but, walking briskly forwards, puts up the vast swarm, who invariably fly off to one side and wheel round as they gather under their leader, to the opposite side. There is a moment when the flock is veering, at which it presents a dense mass to the eye, and it is at this moment that the sportsman fires. We have known over three-score larks thus slain in a single shot. It is impossible to estimate the number of larks killed annually in this country; some idea of it may perhaps be formed by the myriads of them brought to the London markets during the winter season; it is not uncommon to see several bushels of them lying on a single poulterer's stall; and when we remember that in the rural districts everybody shoots them, that they are the first game of the incipient sportsman, upon which he tries his "prentice hand" before he ventures into the stubbles, we may almost wonder that so many of them are left to cheer us with their songs in the summer.

The sparrows are subject to hardly less persecution than the larks, though they are held in very different estimation. From time out of mind the farmers have borne enmity against them, and they had the wicked wit in times gone by to enlist the parish authorities on their side. When the writer was a boy, the bigwigs of country villages and farming districts used to set a price on sparrows' heads, and pay down so much a dozen-the pollage varying from threepence to fivepence in different places-for as many as were brought. This custom, which was as old as Fielding's time, maintains a perpetual war against the helpless birds, and it was a common practice to hunt them at night by beating the bushes with long wands; the birds, roused from their nests, flew towards a light carried by one of the party, and were received in a yawning net stretched by others in front of the flame. When the parish pollage ceased, this practice went out of fashion; but

sparrows are still caught in enormous quantities, for the purpose of being shot from the trap at shooting matches, and for private practice. In winter time, when the trees are bare, the sparrows are fond of roosting in the sides and under the eaves of the stacks in the corn-yard; when they are wanted, all that is necessary is to go with a light, a clap-net, and a long stick, as soon as darkness sets in, and by thrashing the stacks to scare the birds from their coverts, when they are sure to become entangled in the net.

We might tell of wholesale and cruel slaughter upon the mixed flocks of small birds who are driven to association by the rigours of winter, and on whom the thoughtless rustic practices a hundred deadly arts at the season of their greatest distress; but enough has been said of this open hostility towards the little birds, to give the reader some adequate idea of its severity. Far worse, however, than such open hostility, fatal as it is, is the practice which has lately sprung up, of destroying birds indiscriminately and by wholesale, with poisoned grain. We read of one man boasting that he has killed over eighteen hundred sparrows, and of a lady, forsooth, who swept off eight hundred small birds at one stroke by strychnine; and in various parts of the country entire rookeries have gone to destruction-the old birds dropping in their flight, and lying dead all over the lawns and fields, while their young are left to starve to death in their nest.

This frightful practice of poisoning is one of the hateful wiles of human selfishness, coupled with the grossest ignorance. Of selfishness, because the poisoner assumes that the land and all its products are his exclusive property, and that the benevolent Creator has designed them for his sole use. He does not recognize the claims of the lower orders of existence; according to him, they have no business to exist at all; he ignores and repudiates the covenant under which God has made him master of the world— the covenant being, that he should exercise the duty of humanity

towards every living creature; he imagines that the songsters of the grove stand in the way of his profit, and therefore, instead of acknowledging that they

"Are free to live and to enjoy their life

As He was free to form them at the first,
Who in His sovereign wisdom made them all,”

he dooms them to death, spurns their claim to his regard, and, as far as he can, blots them out of the divine scheme of life. Brutal as this conduct is, however, it is not half so brutal as it is disgracefully ignorant and presumptuous. The great Author of nature has weighed everything in accurate scales. He who decreed that every living creature, great and small, should be the food of other creatures, took care so to strike the balance that no particular race should increase in such numbers as to be tyrannous to the rest, while all should be numerous enough to minister to the wants of his chief creature, man. To interfere with this grand and beneficent arrangement by the gratuitous destruction of animal life is the most senseless species of meddling of which man can be guilty, and is sure to result in the defeat of the very purpose it was intended to further. In the matter of the birds this has been proved beyond a doubt, as we have already said, and additional evidence is being daily furnished of the fact. Where the birds have been poisoned off, the wireworm and the fly are desolating the field crops; and the farmers are compelled to hire boys and girls to do ineffectually what the birds once did for them gratuitously and well. Some years back the Mauritian sugar-planters, in introducing fresh sugar-canes into their island, accidentally introduced the "borer caterpillar with them. Unfortunately they did not introduce the birds which in other sugar-colonies feed on the caterpillar and keep down its numbers, and the consequence is, that they lost twenty thousand tons of sugar during one year, by the ravages

of that insect, and are now offering 2,000l. to any one who will find the means of getting rid of it. At home, in our gardens, the plague of insects is now felt to be far greater than it was in former years; and every horticulturist who competes for a prize knows too well that his chance of success depends not only on the excellence and treatment of his plant, but also on his preserving it by constant watching against the assaults of grubs and caterpillars.

MORE ABOUT BIRD MURDER.

It is well known that small birds are very scarce in some parts of the Continent; but their destruction is not so senseless there as it is with us. They are eaten in France and Italy. They are sold in the market by scores. Monsieur brings home his pockets full, after a day's shooting, and madame has them hung up in the larder. Signor makes, in some places, very ingenious arrangements for the capture of small birds: he spreads a net between two trees, and sits himself high up among the branches of one of them. When the "game" approaches, he flings a stick down at it; the poor little thing mistakes the missile for an enemy, perhaps a hawk, and dodging down between the trees to avoid it, pops into signor's net. This, I say, is intelligible. Signora plucks the wagtail, and it smokes upon the board; but our English destructives kill under a stupid mistake. The farmer gives so much a dozen for sparrows' heads or eggs; a sparrow club is formed, at which prizes are awarded to the destroyers of the greatest number.

These thoughtless wholesale executioners are not probably aware of the mischief done, not by their victims, but by themselves; and yet it seems strange, not only that they should be so unobservant as to live in the country and remain thus ignorant of the habits of

small birds, but that they should defy the accumulated testimony of naturalists. It does not speak much for the intelligence of our middle country classes when so much popular science is disseminated, and yet a number of farmers can be found to join in a systematic slaughter of some of their best friends. No doubt sparrows eat corn in harvest—indeed, more or less, when they can get it; but they can be easily scared away during the short time that the grain is ripe for their food in the field.

I want, however, to ask the destroyers of little birds, "What do you think they eat during the greater part of the year, when there is no grain? Above all, what do they feed their young with?” Look into a nest-see the chorus of yellow mouths wide open in blind faith. Observe their unfledged and well-filled, but most certainly unpleasant-looking stomachs. How are they supplied? Upon what do these insatiable little gourmands live? Insects. All day long, from daybreak to dusk, papa and mamma are flitting backwards and forwards, from the field and the garden to the nest, and popping flies, grubs, and insects into the half-dozen hungry mouths. There is no satisfying them. Their meal is day long. They take in at one mouthful as much in proportion as a man consumes during the whole of his dinner. Conceive a score of nests in the neighbourhood of a garden. Say that a hundred mouths are being filled for twelve or fourteen hours at a time, filled, too, as fast as they can be, and what a removal of pernicious insects does not this represent! Yet the countryman kills these indefatigable scavengers, because they pick a little corn.

It is not, however, during the breeding time that they transfer mischievous insects from the plant to their young broods, but before and afterwards they themselves are incessantly on the alert for grubs, and other plagues of the farmer and the gardener. Watch a lawn, or a hedge-row, for half an hour, and see how ceascless is the consumption of insects. The swallow snaps them