THE MAGPIE. 323 



tion, you may see them in little parties of fifteen or twenty together, 

 flitting from tree to tree in noisy conversation. Sometimes they will 

 rise to a great height in the air, passing through it with a velocity 

 which seems hitherto to have escaped the notice of naturalists. 



Like all other birds in a wild state, magpies become vociferous at 

 the approach of night; and he who loves to watch the movements 

 of animated nature, may observe them, in small detached companies, 

 proceeding to their wonted roosting-places, in some wood of spruce, 

 pine, or larch, which they seem to prefer to any other. There they 

 become valuable watchmen for the night. Whoever enters the grove 

 is sure to attract their special notice ; and then their chattering is 

 incessant. Whenever I here it during the night, or even during the 

 day (except towards nightfall), I know that there is mischief on the 

 stir. Three years ago, at eleven o'clock in broad day, I was at the 

 capture of one of the most expert and desperate marauders that ever 

 scourged this part of the country. He had annoyed me for a length 

 of time ; and was so exceedingly cunning, that, when we went in 

 pursuit of him, he always contrived to escape, either by squatting 

 down in the thick cover of the woods, or by taking himself off in 

 time when he saw us approach. At last, he owed his capture to the 

 magpies. We were directed to the place of his depredations by the 

 incessant chatterings of these birds in the tops of the trees, just over 

 the spot where he was working in his vocation. He had hanged 

 fourteen hares ; and the ground was so covered with brambles and 

 brushwood, that, when we surprised him, he told us that we ne-ver 

 should have found him, had it not been for the cursed magpies. 

 His name was Kirk. In the course of the following summer, he set 

 out on his travels towards New South Wales, at the king's expense, 

 having been convicted, at the York assizes, of an overweening in- 

 clination for his neighbour's mutton, to which he had helped himself 

 most abundantly. 



" On the 6th of May 1837, 1 found a magpie's nest on a Scotch fir 

 in the same wood where the herons breed. I mounted the tree, and 

 saw that there were five magpie eggs in the nest. I took one of 

 these eggs away with me. On the i6th of the same month, in pass- 

 ing under this tree, I observed a heron's eggshell on the ground. It 



