io8 BIRDS OF THE WAVE AND WOODLAND 



the old nursery has been destroyed. What they detest is 

 wire-netting- of too fine a mesh for them to get through and 

 the spectacle of grain scattered inside which they cannot 

 reach. It is then that poor feeble man triumphs over the 

 obstreperous sparrow and can exult over the birds as they 

 hop, chirping round and round the impossible feast. 



In London there is always enough food for the small 

 creatures, and even in the hardest winter, wdien blackbirds 

 and thrushes and all kinds of other birds, unsuspected resi- 

 dents many of them, are picked up dead in the parks and 

 gardens, the sparrow is not pinched. So that in the popularity 

 of the sparrow there is no tenderness involved. Londoners 

 like him because he is one of themselves, because he is plucky 

 and self-reliant, taking things much as they come ; because he 

 stands upon his rights, or what he has come to call his rights ; 

 is robust, and never " down at the mouth." He is a dirty little 

 ragamuffin, but not in the least ashamed of himself, for he 

 takes his small smoky dusty person into the presence of 

 Royalty with as much assurance as into a mews, and chirps 

 as complacently all through service in Westminster Abbey as 

 in a rain-spout in Shoreditch. The metropolitan cat seldom 

 arrives at a sparrow, just as the small gamins of the streets 

 never get run over by cabs. Their whole lives are spent in 

 evasion, and they develop an extraordinary agility in escaping 

 from accidents. I find it very hard to defend the familiar little 

 fowl and almost as hard to accuse him, That he behaves with 



