2 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



records of long nights passed in a punt, with a north 

 wind blowing and freezing him to the marrow in spite 

 of his thick woollen clothing and long boots and oil- 

 skins, and the glorious conclusion of the adventure when 

 he happily succeeds in sending a thousand pellets of 

 burning lead into an innumerable multitude of mallard, 

 widgeon, teal, pochard, and pintail; how for several 

 successive winters he repeated the operation until the 

 persecuted fowl began to diminish so greatly in num- 

 bers that he forsook that estuary or haunt on the coast 

 to follow them elsewhere, or transferred his attentions 

 to some other far-distant point, where other wholesale 

 killers had not been before him. No, this is not a sport- 

 ing record, despite the title, and if long titles were the 

 fashion nowadays, it would have been proper to call 

 the book "The Adventures of a Soul, sensitive or not, 

 among the feathered masterpieces of creation." This 

 would at all events have shown at once whence the title 

 was derived, and would have better served to indicate 

 the nature of the contents. 



It all comes to this, that we have here another book 

 about birds, which demands some sort of apology. 



In England, a small country, we have not too many 

 species — two or three hundred, let us say, according to 

 the number of visitants we include or exclude; all ex- 

 ceedingly well known. For birds are observed more 

 than any other class of creatures, and we are not only 

 an observant but a book-writing people, and books have 

 been written on this subject since the time of Queen 

 Elizabeth — as a fact the first book (1544) was before 



