TO THE READER x5 



These few details excepted, and I am sure any professional 

 rat-catcher will say the book is capital ; moreover, it is well- 

 written. Another book as ill-written as Mr. Barkley's is 

 well-written is the Autobiography of an English Game- 

 keeper — a book worth a cart-load of Jeffries' Gamekeeper 

 at Home. When you get over the brag — and you do not 

 mind it, if your experience is as mine, that the braggart is 

 often as not a brave man, especially in East Anglia — you will 

 find the practical part of the book thorough and absolutely 

 correct, and you will smile at the bungling treatise on 

 snaring hares as written by the " Amateur Poacher." But 

 Mr. John Wilkins would be surprised were he to watch 

 the poacher set snares in the marshes, varying the height 

 according to the season, a necessary discretion I do not 

 remember him alluding to. However, I trust he will give 

 us more books, and " cut the cackle (or badly told stories), 

 and stick to the 'osses." 



I have in these papers endeavoured to give an artistic 

 biography of each bird, beast, and fish of the Broad district, 

 and in many cases I have added my friend Mr. T. A. Cotton's 

 excellent and often beautiful photographs. Mr. Cotton is an 

 enthusiastic bird lover, and is getting together one of the best 

 collections in England, sparing neither trouble nor expense 

 in the attainment of his object. Each one of my papers is 

 based on observations made in the Broad district over a 

 period of eight years, at all seasons of the year, and at every 

 hour of the day and night ; for I have slept on — not near — 

 those waters, perhaps more than any writer. And this 

 brings me to the bird literature of the district. Of course, 

 the stupidly illustrated Birds of Norfolk, by the late Mr. 

 Stevenson, is the standard work, and an excellent rhume of 

 the birds of the district it is ; but Mr. Stevenson's attempts 

 at fine writing and poetry are of the cheapest, and, to my 

 mind, spoil an otherwise excellent work — so far as it goes ; 

 for Mr. Stevenson evidently did not know intimately the 

 outdoor life of the birds he wrote about from personal 



