THE ROBIN REDBREAST 



pleasant mansion was being built, a pair of 

 robins, having successfully brought up one 

 family in one of the unfinished rooms, actu- 

 ally reared a second brood hi a hole made for 

 a scaffold-pole, though the sitting bird, 

 being immediately beneath a plank on which 

 the plasterers stood at work, was repeatedly 

 splashed with mortar ! The egg of the robin 

 is subject to considerable variety of type. 

 I think it was the late Lord Lilford who, 

 speaking on the subject of a Bill for the 

 protection of wild birds' eggs, then before 

 the House of Lords, gave it as his belief 

 that no ornithologist of repute would swear 

 to the name of a single British bird's egg 

 without positively seeing one or other of 

 the parent birds fly off the nest. This was, 

 perhaps, a little overstating the difficulty of 

 evidence, since any schoolboy with a fancy 

 for birds-nesting might without hesitation 

 identify such pronounced types as those of 

 the chaffinch, with its purple blotches, the 

 song-thrush with its black spots on a blue 

 ground, or the nightingale, which resembles 

 a miniature olive. Eggs, on the other hand, 

 like those of the house sparrow, redshank 

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