2 The Study of Wild Birds 
habitually deride that which is above their intelligence. At this 
time my regiment was quartered in Dublin; it was in June. Owing 
to the usual military exercises and work carried on during the 
summer months it was not easy to get away from the garrison, 
save now and again for a couple of days and very often that could 
not be managed. The inevitable consequence was that a large 
number of young officers possessed both of the means and the 
desire to go on endless rounds of amusement found themselves 
unable to take advantage of the seductive pleasures open to them. 
It is one of the curses of peace-soldiering that the work is so 
calculated or rather miscalculated as to bring the minimum amount 
of advantage to the Service and the maximum amount of worry 
and waste of time to those engaged in its execution. Under such 
conditions anything which can conduce to giving officers and men 
a change from the red-tape and routine is of great value and 
the surest antidote to an attack of ‘‘ grousing.” 
In accordance with the habit of my lifetime, since I had arrived 
in Dublin I had been keenly on the look-out for some fresh locality 
where I could visit some of my beloved birds and learn more about 
their nesting habits and I had recently obtained permission from 
the owner of a rocky island off the east coast of Ireland to visit 
it with that object in view. Accordingly I went to our barracks 
to enlist recruits for a forty-eight hours’ expedition and had no 
difficulty in getting all I required. It was whilst engaged in the 
necessary instructions as to food, equipment and ropes, that a 
sapient young officer made the remark with which this story begins, 
prior to calling for another: cigarette and strolling out of the ante- 
room. The reproof thus conveyed to the party of miserable birds- 
nesters was none the less pointed in that its author proceeded to 
the Yacht Club at Kingstown from the window of which he could 
look at other people’s yachts at anchor and at stated intervals 
bore his friends by his views on the length of the boom of the 
Britannia or some other abstract nautical topic. 
