THE IMMORTAL NIGHTINGALE 251 



a youn;:^ barbarian myself and liad no sucli books to 

 instruct and delight nie. 



But I have another and better reason than the fact 

 of the existence of all these activities for my belief that 

 a change is taking place in the country boy's mind, that 

 his interest and pleasure in the wild bird is growing, 

 and that as it grows he becomes less destructive. A 

 good deal of my time is passed in the villages in different 

 parts of the country; I make the acquaintance of the 

 children and get into the confidence of many small boys 

 and find out what they do and think and feel about 

 the birds, and it is my experience that in recent years 

 something new has come into their minds — a sweeter, 

 humaner feeling about their feathered fellow-creatures. 

 I also take into account the spirit which is revealed in 

 the village school children's essays written for tlie Bird 

 and Tree competitions established by the Royal Society 

 for the Protection of Birds. During the last four or 

 five years I have had to read many hundreds of these 

 essays, each dealing with one species from the child's 

 own personal observation and it has proved a very 

 pleasing task to me because so many of the young es- 

 sayists had put their whole heart in theirs. Their 

 enthusiasm shines, even in the weakest of these com- 

 positions, considered merely as essays, and we may 

 imagine that the country boy or girl of ten or twelve 

 or thirteen finds the task assigned him not a very simple 

 one, to be placed at a table with sheets of foolscap paper 

 before him and given an hour in which to compose an 

 essay on the bird, selected — the gist of his observations; 



