the house-tops, if they always stopped there, we might extend to them a generous admiration; but when they contest with us the habitations which we have built for ourselves, and repay us for our protection with impudence only, such sympathy is difficult.
How then can he be defended, this chief vagabond of the air? On his merits he stands categorically convicted, and for his shortcomings it is difficult to find excuse or palliation. Did he ever suffer from winter as the wild things of copse and hedge do, or from drought, or from the encroachments of civilization, his small presumptions might pass unchallenged, as do those of the robins and the finches. But for him there is no frost so severe that it checks the supply of food in the streets, no snow so thick that it blocks up the sparrow’s entrance to goods, sheds, and storehouses. His year has no Ramazan for him. For drought or flood he cares as little. His nurseries do not suffer by rising rivers, nor are his meals curtailed by any severity of the seasons. Nor yet when man, advancing, pushes back the domains of wild things in waste land and wood, does the sparrow share in the troubles which fall to the lot of the songsters of the countryside. Wherever man goes he follows him, a parasite of his grain bags; and no city in which our countrymen have settled is without him.
I remember myself noticing, during the late campaigns in Afghanistan and Zululand, how the sparrows went wherever the commissariat wagons went, and established a colony at every depot. They crossed the Cabul River and the Buffalo with our armies, claiming at once privileges of conquest which our generals hesitated to assert. They levied instant toll on the grain fields, and billeted themselves upon the natives.
