INTRODUCTION. xxi 



It seems now almost possible to form some scientific conception of the 

 history of a bird. One can picture the little Willow-Wren, for example, 

 basking in the winter sunshine of an oasis in the Sahara for the first time 

 in his life, silently feeding on the insects that abound on the palm-trees, 

 the figs, the vines, the olives, the almonds, and the pomegranates of the 

 south. One can imagine that he has almost forgotten the terrors and the 

 fatigues of the long journey from Yorkshire, and looks back upon them as 

 on a dream. But as spring comes on, the merry cheerfulness of his life 

 begins to cloud over, he feels languid and ill and out of spirits because he 

 has begun to sicken for his first moult. His plumage begins to look 

 shabby, and the life seems to have died out of his feathers; half his 

 appetite is gone, and he sulks for hours on some sheltered perch, 

 wondering what is the matter with himself. But as his new feathers 

 begin to appear, new life returns to his system, his appetite comes back 

 again, every day he grows stronger and stronger, and his nervous dread of 

 being seized by the Hawks, which are ever on the watch for weakly birds, 

 leaves him. When his new dress has grown perfect in all its glossy 

 silkiness he exults in his pride of beauty and health; but he does not 

 return to his easy happy winter-life. He is overflowing with health and 

 high spirits ; but new feelings are springing up in his little breast, the 

 first dawnings of sexual affection, and he essays a timid attempt at a song. 

 But the course of his true love does not run smooth. Somehow or other 

 he knows that he must again brave the long journey that he made in the 

 autumn. He has inherited some dim memory of the arid summer of the 

 Sahara, and a still clearer notion of his duty to leave it before food 

 becomes scarce. All at once the beautiful oasis has lost its charms for 

 him ; he cannot satisfactorily associate the idea of love with Africa ; he 

 has grown restless and home-sick, and go home he must, and does. 



Fifteen hundred miles, as the crow flies, away to the north, the leaves 

 are just coming out on the oak trees that shelter the bilberries and the 

 heather down by the beck-side in the remnant of the old Yorkshire forest 

 where our little Willow- Wren was born. A cold east wind rattles through 

 the branches of the trees ; but under the shelter of a thick bough of 

 evergreen Scotch fir a little bird sits silently on a slender twig. It is our 

 little Willow-Wren, tired and sad after his long journey, and he "has had 

 enough to make him sad if only he recollects it ; and if he can recollect 

 his road from Morocco hither, he, may be, recollects what happened on the 

 road; the long weary journey up the Portuguese coast and through the 

 gap between the Pyrenees and the Jaisquivel, and up the Landes of Bor- 

 deaux and through Brittany, flitting by night and hiding and feeding as he 

 could by day ; and how his mates flew against the lighthouses and were 

 killed by hundreds, and how he essayed the British Channel and was 

 blown back shrivelled up by bitter blasts, and how he felt nevertheless that 



