202 BIRDS OF THE WAVE AND WOODLAND 



Museum in 1883. But the kingfisher's nest is not the only 

 article that a deluded public seems to imagine the British 

 Museum is still pining for, for as a letter to the Times by 

 Sir J. Flower in 1894 tells us, offers are regularly received of 

 tortoise-shell tom-cats at the most exorbitant prices, and 

 inquiries continue to come in, asking if it is true that the 

 Museum has offered a hundred pounds for "an entire cigar- 

 ash." 



Nowhere can the lover of Nature find more to spend his 

 time over than in the pretty haunts of this pretty bird. As 

 a schoolboy I have spent many hours in water-meadows 

 watching the bird-life about me, and, sitting on some mossy 

 stump in the middle of the marsh-marigolds or on some rail 

 that straddled across the water, enjoyed the little spectacles, 

 comic and serious, that various companies of amateurs — 

 moor-hen and water-rat, bunting and reed-warbler and weasel 

 — presented for my entertainment. 



My visits to the kingfisher's osier-beds were often 

 really Platonic. There were no eggs to be taken that I had 

 not enough of and to spare in my collection. Albeit the 

 chance of a cuckoo's egg always made looking into every 

 nest I found "a pleasurable expectation," which was just 

 often enough fulfilled to make the quest a perpetual hope. 



Not that the keeper — "arbiter of this terraqueous swamp " 

 — would have believed me if he had caught me, and 

 no monkey in Brazilian forests hated the jaguar more 



