60 Rock Thrushes 



can want him, his green head glistening in the March 

 sunshine against his maroon breast and his pearly grey 

 back ; but go and search over there amongst the rushes 

 and the osiers, staring hard perhaps at his duck on her 

 downy nest, her head twisted round to assist the decep- 

 tion of turning herself into a small heap of dead leaves ; 

 and I may lay odds that you don't detect where she lays 

 eggs, unless your eye is in practice, and your percep- 

 tion keen for things in bird life. 



And so the rock thrush mothers her pale blue eggs, 

 concealed upon her nest in some rocky bank, where 

 the Alpine rhododendron, showered over with carmine 

 flower heads, makes rosy blushes on the mountain's 

 face; her mate meanwhile, rising on quivering wings to 

 utter a song of impetuous warbling, falls back with 

 outspread wings to perch on the great lichen-covered 

 boulder that overshadows her. 



The high ground of France, in Auvergne, for in- 

 stance, is also a summer resort of this lovely bird. 



A road that winds up and away from the picturesque 

 town of Mont Dore, where asthmatical invalids collect 

 for drinking the waters and taking the baths, leads you 

 through pine forests which ascend steeply on the one 

 side to be lost sight of in the heights above, whilst on 

 the other they clothe the precipices which fall abruptly 

 from your very feet, and finally brings you to the 

 summit of those hills, from whence a panorama of 

 what seems the whole of France stretches for leagues 

 below you, a plain from which, in the immediate fore- 

 ground, gigantic castles of natural rock separated by 

 deep gullies from the main body of mountains, rise in 



