and sometimes, whilst doing so, pecks at the great black trunk. Now he is standing on them contentedly, with the water touching his crimson breast-feathers. He is in his first or more primitive figure, for the robin has two. Either he is a little round globe with a sunset in him—his rotundity being broken only by a beak and a tail—or else very elegant, dapper, and well set up. In the first he is fluffy, for he has ruffled out his feathers, but in the last he has pressed them down and is smooth and glossy—has almost a polish on him." Again, whilst walking by the river in the early morning, the water being very low, "a robin hops down over the exposed shingle, to near the water's edge, then flies across to the opposite more muddy surface, and hops along it, pecking here and there. He again flies across and proceeds in the same way, always going up the stream, crosses again, and so on. Each time he is farther away from me, and now I lose sight of him; but this is evidently his system. How out of character he seems amidst the mud and ooze of the dank river-bed on this chill winter's morning, how little like the robin of poetry and Christmas-card, how much more in the style of some little mud-loving, stilt-walking bird: for this is often their manner of zig-zagging from shore to shore up or down the stream. I have noticed it but now in the redshank. Yet the old associations are with him, for this is home, and the thatched cottage peeps over the familiar hedge."
And here I will chronicle an experience—my own, if it be not that of others. Provided there be shrubbery about, there are but few places here in England
