ceremonie—and makes as though to fly away. But having gone only a little distance, with quick strokes of the wings, it rests upon their expanded surface, and, in a lovely easy sweep, sails round again in the direction from whence it started. It passes beyond the place, the wings now again pulsating, then makes another wide sweep of grace and comes down near where it was before. In a little it again rises, again sweeps and circles, and again descends in the neighbourhood. Another now appears, flying towards it, and as it passes over where the first is sitting, this one rises into the air to meet it. They approach, glide from each other, again approach, and thus alternately widening and narrowing the distance between them, one at length goes down, the other passing on to alight, at last, at that distance which the etiquette of the affair prescribes. This circling flight on swiftly resting wings is most beautiful. The pausing sweep, the lazy onwardness, the marriage, as it were, of rest and speed is a delicious thing, another sense, a delicate purged voluptuousness, a very banquet to the eye." Such beauty-flights are almost always in the early morning, when appreciative persons are mostly in bed, seen only by the dull eye of some warrener walking to find and kill the beasts that have lain tortured in his traps all night, exciting (if any) but a murderous thought at the time, with the after-reflection, "If I'd a had a gun now"
Stock-doves, as is well known, often choose rabbit-burrows to lay their eggs in, and, having regard to their powers of flight and arborial aptitudes, it might be thought that but for the rabbits they would never
