104? Observations on the Habits of the Rook. 



large ; the feathers on the neck and rump much elongated ; 

 the spurs curved, and about l^in. long; the two largest 

 feathers in her tail arched, and four or five smaller arched 

 ones, of a beautiful and glossy colour, hanging down on each 

 side of the tail. In a word, this hen had so masculine an 

 appearance, that, when strangers looked at her, they all took 

 her to be a cock, and it was with difficulty I persuaded them 

 that she was a hen. We allowed her the range of a sheltered 

 grass-plot, flanked on one side by holly trees, and open to the 

 lake on the other. Here, also, was placed in a cage the 

 young rook which I had taken from the nest of the carrion 

 crow. The hen showed such an antipathy to it, that, when- 

 ever I held it to her, she would immediately fly at it. When 

 visiters came to inspect her, I had only to take the rook 

 out of the cage, and pit it against her, when she would stand 

 upright, raise the long feathers on her neck, and begin to 

 cackle, cluck, and crow. One morning the rook had managed 

 to push aside a bar in front of its cage. A servant, in passing 

 by, looked into it, and missed the bird. The hen had also 

 disappeared. On search being made, they were both found 

 floating side by side, dead, in the lake below. We conjectured 

 that the hen had pursued the rook after its escape from the 

 cage, and that the wind, which blew very strong that morning, 

 liad forced them both into a watery grave. I had still one 

 rook left at the gamekeeper's. It was kept in a cage, which 

 was placed on a little stand in his garden ; and I had given 

 orders that upon no account was it to be allowed to go at large. 

 The feathers remained firm at the base of the bill till the 

 15th of August; on which day the keeper perceived that 

 a few feathers had dropped from the lower mandible, and 

 were lying at the bottom of the cage. In a couple of weeks 

 more, the lower mandible had begun to put on a white scurfy 

 appearance, while here and there a few feathers had fallen 

 from the upper one. This is the purport of the keeper's in- 

 formation to me, on my return home from Bavaria. On the 

 31st of the same month, a terrible storm set in. By what the 

 keeper told me, the night must have been as dark and dismal 

 as that in which poor King Lear stood in lamentation, and 

 exposed his hoary locks to the four rude winds of heaven. 

 A standard white-heart cherry tree, }ierhaps the finest in 

 Yorkshire, and which, for many generations, had been the 

 pride and ornament of this place, lost two large branches 

 during the gale ; and in the morning, when the keeper rose, 

 he found the cage shattered and upset, and driven to the far- 

 thest corner of his garden. The rook was quite dead. It 

 had lost its life, either through the inclemency of that stormy 



