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No nightingale north of the Trent,) it is said; and the 
difference between birds of the various districts of England is 
almost as great as the difference between the dingy sparrow of 
Carlisle streets and a Bird of Paradise. How amazed, for instance, 
I should be if on coming home through the Woodside plantations 
some evening, I heard the wild, mocking cry of the Great “Yaffir,” 
or Laughing Woodpecker,” a sound I have heard daily in Hamp- 
shire; or in early morning I saw the uncanny Wryneck swarming 
up the bole of one of my apple-trees, as I have seen him many a 
score of times in Somersetshire. 
I will instance the desirability of a careful knowledge of district 
peculiarities, by showing how I once ran a certain amount of risk 
by the want of such knowledge in a strange place. It is generally 
known that there are but two kinds of snakes in England? —the 
green harmless snake,‘ a pretty shining creature of gentle manners, 
and the Viper or Adder, dingy in his olive-coloured skin, with 
flattened vicious head and poisonous bite. Well, one fine summer 
day, upon the threshold of my home in Somersetshire—just on the 
borders of Dorsetshire—at the open door, basking upon the warm 
flag-stone, I spied a gorgeous creature—a snake indeed such as I 
had never seen, of a fiery golden red, glittering and beautiful. No 
adder, thought I, could ever shine so; you, my friend, must be 
harmless. I could not kill him upon my very door-stone, and I 
stooped down to pick him up and caress him. I did not do so, 
‘however, but guided him with my stick into a bed of evergreens 
hard by, and made a note of his appearance. He was a Dorset- 
shire Red Adder, I found out at last,—by pertinacious enquiry, for 
there was no local museum—a hurtful beast, even more venomous 
than his dingy-coloured brother, and a variety unknown except in 
Dorsetshire and its immediate borders. 
Cui bono? of what good is all this trifling? some may ask—a 
Singing bird is a singing bird. None who have not tried it know 
+I have since been told that nightingales are heard every spring at 
Prestwich Cleugh, near Manchester.—J. A. 
2 Picus viridis, 
® That is, if we leave the rare Coronella levis out of account, and regard 
’ the Slow-worm as a Lizard. 
* Natrix torquatus. ° Vipera berus,—(ED.) 
