154 Midland Village: Railway and Woodland. 



which probably do more harm to the game in a 

 single week of April or May, than the beautiful 

 mice-eating Kestrel does during the whole year. 

 They all rob the nests of the pheasants and 

 partridges, both of eggs and young ; and when I 

 saw one day in the wood the bodies of some 

 twenty robbers hung up on a branch, all belong- 

 ing to these three species, I could not but feel 

 that justice had been done, for it is not only 

 game birds who are their victims. A large 

 increase of these three species would probably 

 have a serious result on the smaller winged 

 population of a wood. 



Among the more interesting inhabitants of the 

 wood, there are two species which have not as 

 yet been spoken of in these chapters the Grass- 

 hopper Warbler and the Nightingale. The former 

 has no right to be called a warbler, except in so 

 far as it belongs to one of those three families 

 mentioned in a former chapter, in which all our 

 British ' warblers ' are now included. It has no 

 song, properly so called ; but no one who has the 

 luck to watch it alive, even without a detailed 

 examination of its structure, will doubt its true 



