not following her, but continuing to hop about in each other's vicinity as before. She remained there some five or ten minutes, when she flew out over the warrens, and with my attention concentrated on the rival birds, I lost her, and cannot say where she went down.
"One of the male wheatears now enters a shallow depression in the ground—not a hole, or the mouth of a rabbit-burrow, but one of those natural fallings away of the soil which make rugged and give a character to these sandy, lichen-clothed wastes. As soon as he is in it he seems to become excited, and running forward and coming out on the opposite brink, he flies from this to the one by which he has entered, hardly two feet off, then instantly back again, again to the other, and so backwards and forwards some dozen or twenty times, so rapidly that he makes of himself a little arch in the air constantly spanning the hollow, all in the greatest excitement. Finishing here, he runs a little way to another such depression, enters it, and coming out again, acts in precisely the same way, making the same little rapidly moving arch of two black up-and-down-pointed wings, moving now this way, now that, now forwards, now backwards, from edge to edge of the trough, perching each time on each edge of it, but so quickly, it seems rather to be on the points of the wings than the feet that he comes down. Wings are all one sees; they whirl forwards and backwards, backwards and forwards, making a little arch or bridge, the highest point of which, in the centre—which is the point of the upper wing—is some two feet from the floor of the trough, whilst the point
