396 THE HOUSE SPARROW. 



minutes of the unfurling 1 of the British flag he perches authoritatively on the 

 flagstaff. For hard-headed shrewdness, practically illustrated and successful, 

 commend me to the sparrow. His keen perception into men and things — 

 his scientific diagnosis of the genus homo— are among his ruling traits. 

 Multiplying inordinately, the sparrow is as hardy as prolific. Essentially 

 a creature of circumstances, he is at once ubiquitous and pertinacious, 

 playing, as some say, a questionable part in the economy of nature, he play& 

 a very certain part in the economy of our spouts. When rearing his brood 

 he is actively insectivorous, and confers incalculable benefit upon the 

 agriculturalist ; but as harvest wanes he becomes recklessly graminivorous,, 

 and anon, by a sudden transition, as omnivorous as mankind itself. With 

 digestive organs to be envied, he gulps down pieces of food a twentieth part 

 of his own weight, and deems white lead a luxury. A periodical shot is 

 but the means of transferring it from an empty stook in one part of the 

 field to a full one in another. The moral of 'Damn that boy, he's asleep 

 again,' has long been a pointless joke with sparrows; and his rattle only 

 conveys an unpleasant association of the coming of the reaper. With an 

 ever active brain, and surviving as the fittest, no cunning engine has ever 

 been devised greatly destructive to sparrows, and the various machinations, 

 as handed down by inherited instinct, are probably better known to the 

 orthodox sparrow than to man himself. The pitiable personation of Hodge 

 as a scarecrow is recognised by the sparrow as affording a happy hunting- 

 ground for insects, and having served this end, is ripped up and disem- 

 bowelled, its internal economy torn out to make room for a brood of young 

 sparrows, thereby adding insult to injury in the basest fashion. The 

 sparrow is, in short — to paraphrase Bacon — 'a wise thing for itself, but 

 a shrewd thing for everybody else.' Bold, active, and vivacious, its 

 distribution is as wide as that of the Briton. Patronising art, science, and 

 law, the sparrow broods and breeds in the temples dedicated to their 

 shrines, and in our European capital has unwittingly tried to destroy the 

 balance of justice by constructing her nest in one of the pans held by the 

 blind emblem of that inestimable virtue. In other instances the sparrow 

 has shut the .sight of an Emperor, built her nest in the outstretched palm of 

 a great warrior, and, radical as the bird is, chirrups beneath and occupies 

 the thatch of the lowliest peasant husbandman." 



In America an instructive paper has been issued by the United 

 States Department of Agriculture, which is interesting to us 

 whose naturalization in the New World has carried havoc in its 

 train. Great things were expected from the British sparrow, 

 for, owing to their love of fowling, scarcely a small bird was to 

 be seen near any large American town. In an evil hour it was 

 resolved by the municipal authorities of the Quaker City to 

 import a thousand sparrows to adjust the balance of nature, 

 which the general American "granger" is not likely to forget, 

 for the British sparrow is now looked upon with as kindly feelings 

 as the Australians do on the rabbit, or the Tasmanian on the 

 horticulturist who introduced the sweet briar, or the Antipodnans 

 generally on the Scot who first nurtured his patriotisn on the 

 daisy and thistle. 



"For twenty-five years the sparrow has been steadily occupying fresh 

 territory, like other bipeds, moving west, until it spread over 895,000 square 

 miles in the United States, and 158,000 in Canada, Any climate suits it. 



