RAVENS IN SOMERSET 161 



doubt a very lively, pretty, engaging creature — so 

 for that matter is the house fly — but between our- 

 selves and the small birds there exists, psychologi- 

 cally, a vast gulf. Birds, says Matthew Arnold, live 

 beside us, but unknown, and try how we will we can 

 find no pasages from our souls to theirs. But to 

 Arnold — in the poem to which I have alluded at all 

 events — a bird simply meant a caged canary ; he 

 was not thinking of the larger, more mammal-like, 

 and therefore more human-like, mind of the raven, 

 and, it may be added, of the crows generally. 



The pair 1 spent so long a time in watching were 

 greatly disturbed at my presence on the cliff. Their 

 anxiety was not strange, seeing that their nest is 

 annually plundered in the interest of the " cursed 

 collector," as Sir Herbert Maxwell has taught us to 

 name the worst enemy of the rarer British birds. 

 The " worst," T say; but there is another almost if 

 not quite as bad, and who in the case of some species 

 is really worse. At intervals of from fifteen to 

 twenty minutes they would appear overhead utter- 

 ing their angry, deep croak, and, with wings out- 

 spread, seemingly without an effort on their part 

 allow the wind to lift them higher and higher until 

 they would look no bigger than daws ; and, after 

 dwelling for a couple of minutes on the air at that 



