HOUSE SPAKROW. ie 
and continually confounded with the Common or House Sparrow. 
And even yet it has not been satisfactorily proved to have occurred 
in much more than half a dozen counties in England. Further 
observation may do more yet in identifying the Tree Sparrow and 
defining its localities. It nests in holes in pollard or other trees, 
or in thatch, m company with other Sparrows of the common 
species, but in this case always in holes entered from the outside, 
not from the inside of the roof of the building. Sometimes it has 
been ascertained to breed in nests made within deserted nests of a 
Magpie, or some such bird. The nest, like that of the Common 
Sparrow, is formed of dry grass or hay, or fine straw, and abun- 
dantly lined with feathers of all sorts. The eggs, four or five in 
general, are distinctly less than those of the House Sparrow, and 
with more decided brown in the markings on the ground-colour 
of soiled white.—Fvg. 6, plate IV. 
100. HOUSE SPARROW—(Passer domesticus). 
Sparrow, Common Sparrow.—He may well be called the 
Common Sparrow, for we find him alike in the town and the 
country, in the field and in the garden, by the road-side hovel or 
in the neighbourhood of the great mansion. And whether he be 
sooty and black with the smoke of mid-London, or with his colours 
pure and unsmirched and bright as in the clear breezy village, he 
is still always the same pert, impudent creature, whose name has 
passed almost into a proverb for bold familiarity. Ubiquitous as 
he is by habit and system, his nest is found in sites almost as 
various and as numerous as the places of his residence. Under 
the tiles or eaves of buildings, in the thatch-edges of a barn, in 
holes in the interior of a thatch-roof, in water-pipes and receivers 
for eaves-gutters, in holes in walls or old buildings, in ivy clothing 
either a wall or a tree, in fir trees, in wall-trees, especially if 
large and high, below Rooks’ nests, in deserted nests of large 
