Bird-keeping. 



foes, such as foxes, weasels, stoats, and wild cats, while 

 rapacious birds, ravens, hawks, and owls, hover over- 

 head, and human assailants wage war against him. 

 Numbers of young birds are destroyed before they 

 are fully fledged ; and of those who arrive at maturity, 

 very many perish during every inclement season from 

 lack of the " pleasant food " they seek. 



And while I deprecate the practice of ensnaring the 

 feathered choristers of our woods and fields, who daily 

 delight us with their harmony ; while I rejoice in their 

 "wood-notes wild," and love to see them flitting hither 

 and thither in the full and free enjoyment of their 

 liberty, I cannot but feel that those philanthropists 

 who indiscriminately denounce all bird-keeping, look 

 only at one side of the question, and take no account 

 of the miseries which many wild birds undergo in 

 " winter and rough weather." Liberty is very sweet, 

 but it has its drawbacks in the perils to which its en- 

 joyment is exposed ; and these should be well con- 

 sidered, before wholesale denunciations are fulminated 

 against those who imprison their feathered neighbours. 

 My outcry would be against those who keep birds 

 without taking any trouble to make them happy; who 

 are content to look upon them, not as sentient beings, 

 but as ornaments to their rooms and appendages to 

 luxury, and take no pains to inquire into their indivi- 

 dual wants and tastes ; who care nothing for their 

 affection, lavish no tenderness upon them ; in fact, 



