52 NATURAL HISTORY OF SEL BORNE. 



call a cane. This piece of intelligence can be little depended 

 on; but farther inquiry may be made. 1 



TOLECAT 



A gentleman in this neighbourhood had two milk white rooks in 

 one nest. A booby of a carter, finding them before they were 

 able to fly, threw them down and destroyed them, to the regret of 

 the owner, who would have been glad to have preserved such a 

 curiosity in his rookery. I saw the birds myself nailed against the 

 end of a barn, and was surprised to find that their bills, legs, feet, 

 and claws were milk white. 



A shepherd saw, as he thought, some white larks on a down 

 above my house this winter : were not these the Emberiza nivalis, 

 the snow-flake of the Brit. Zool. ? No doubt they were. 



A few years ago I saw a cock bullfinch in a cage, which had 

 been caught in the fields after it was come to its full colours. In 

 about a year it began to look dingy ; and, blackening every suc- 

 ceeding year, it became coal-black at the end of four. Its chief 

 food was hempseed. Such influence has food on the colour of 



