BIRDS IN THE GREENWOODS 231 



where one can sit quietly for very long, without a 

 robin stealing softly out and, as it were, sliding him- 

 self into the landscape. Then — however bleak or 

 chill it may be — his presence seems to bring home 

 comforts with it. But this is only when one is near 

 home and home comforts — not when one is far, far 

 away from them. I remember in the great pine- 

 forests of Norway — so lovely yet so stern in their 

 loveliness — the robin seemed to have lost all his 

 character. He did not suggest home and all its 

 pleasures when home was no longer near. It was 

 not (or perhaps it was) that by suggestion he made 

 these seem farther off, but that his character seemed 

 gone. Surely, things are to us as a part of what they 

 move in with us, and, out of this, seem changed and 

 to be something else. 



I am not quite sure if the following represents any 

 change of habits in regard to food, induced by the 

 presence of a foreign tree, in any of the three birds 

 that it concerns. I have occasionally watched the 

 great-tit in our own fir-plantations, but have not yet 

 seen him attacking the cones, though the coal-tit, as I 

 believe, does so. For the greenfinch I can only say 

 that I should not have thought it of him, nor is he 

 often to be seen in such places. The nut-hatch is not 

 common where I live. 



" Standing this Christmas Eve under a large exotic 

 conifer on the lawn of the garden here in Gloucester- 

 shire, I became aware that various birds were busy 

 amongst its branches, and I kept hearing a curious 

 grating noise with a strong vibration in it, which 

 seemed to be made by them with the beak upon the 

 large fir-cones, but as the branches were very close 



