216 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



food, the result being that the bird had declined in 

 numbers to the verge of extinction. The statement 

 has been copied into pretty well every book on British 

 birds since it was made. O wise ornithologists, what 

 does the goldfinch live on during nine months of the 

 year? How does he exist without his natural food? 

 How does he live even in the unnatural conditions 

 of a cage without thistle-seed ? I know of one case 

 in which the poor prisoner lived shut up in his little 

 wire box for eighteen years. Besides, the museum 

 or closet naturalist is very much out of it when he 

 talks about the extirpation of the thistle. The good 

 old plant is doing very well. Long before the Act 

 of 1894-5 which empowers the local authorities to 

 protect their birds, I had been a frequent visitor 

 to, and a haunter of, many extensive thistle-grown 

 places in southern England — chalk downs that were 

 once wheatfields, gone out of cultivation for half a 

 century or longer, ruined sheep-walks, where in July 

 and August I could look over hundreds of acres of 

 rust-brown thistles, covered with their glistening 

 down, the seed "dead ripe," and never a goldfinch 

 in sight! 



And now I must go back to Ryme Intrinseca — the 

 pretty name of that village makes me reluctant to 

 leave it — and to its goldfinches, the little company 

 of twelve fluttering with anxious cries about my head, 

 a very charming spectacle, and to an even more 

 brilliant picture or vision of the past which was all 

 at once restored to my mental eye. We are familiar 

 with the powerful emotional effect of certain odours, 



