NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 73 



about three weeks they are all gone. I shall be very curious to 

 remark whether they will call on us at their return in the spring, 

 as they did last year. 



I want to be better informed with regard to ichthyology. If 

 fortune had settled me near the seaside, or near some great river, 

 my natural propensity would soon have urged me to have made 

 myself acquainted with their productions : but as I have lived 

 mostly in inland parts, and in an upland district, my knowledge 

 of fishes extends little farther than to those common sorts which 

 our brooks and lakes produce. 



I am, etc. 



NOTE TO LETTER XXI. 



1 At Craigyrhiw, a limestone cliff near Oswestry, on the Welsh border, 

 where the jackdaws bred by the thousand, numbers of them made their nests 

 in the rabbit holes at the foot of the rocks. I often used to find a stock -dove's 

 nest in a rabbit hole there too. We would sit and watch them from a crag, 

 until we saw a bird leave or enter. On the Norfolk warrens, too, stock-doves 

 breed in the rabbit holes. 



LETTER XXII. 



SELBORNE, Jan. 2nd, 1769. 



DEAR SIR, As to the peculiarity of jackdaws building with us 

 under the ground in rabbit-burrows, you have, in part, hit upon 

 the reason -, for, in reality, there are hardly any towers or steeples 

 in all this county. And perhaps, Norfolk excepted, 1 Hampshire 

 and Sussex are as meanly furnished with churches as almost any 

 counties in the kingdom. We have many livings of two or three 

 hundred pounds a year, whose houses of worship make little better 

 appearance than dovecots. When I first saw Northamptonshire, 

 Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire, and the fens of Lincoln- 

 shire, I was amazed at the number of spires which presented them- 

 selves in every point of view. As an admirer of prospects, I have 



