THE BOOK: AN APOLOGY 5 



knew it too well to take it for a strange and rare species. 

 But then, he confessed, he had never looked chjscly at 

 it; he liad seen it in (locks in the pastures, always at a 

 distance where it looks i)lain hlack. 



If the lady who discovered the blue-tit, or nun, and 

 my friend who found out the starling, would extend 

 their researches in the feathered world they would find 

 a hundred other species as beautiful in colouring and 

 deliglitful in their ways as those two, and some even 

 more so. 



Much, too, might be said on the subject of many 

 books being written about birds. They are not neces- 

 sarily repetitions. When a writer of fact or fiction puts 

 his friends and acquaintances in a book, as a rule it 

 makes a difference, a decline, in the degree of cordiality 

 in their relations. That is only, of course, when the 

 reader recognizes himself in the portrait. He may not 

 do so, portraits not always being "pure realism," as 

 Mr. Stanhope Forbes says they are. But whether the 

 reader recognizes his own picture or not, the writer 

 himself experiences a change of feeling towards his sub- 

 ject. It is, to put it brutally, similar to that of the boy 

 towards the sucked orange. There is nothing more to 

 be got out of it. It need not be supposed for a moment 

 that the fictionist is friendly towards or interested in 

 his fellow-creatures for the sake of what he can get out 

 of them — that, like the portrait-painter, he is on the 

 look-out for a subject. He has no such unworthy 

 motive, and the change in his feeling comes about in 

 another way. Having built up his picture he looks on 



