98 THE NATURAL HISTORY 



groves to kill them as they came in to roost.^ These are 

 the principal circumstances relating to this wonderful 

 internal migration, which with us takes place towards the 

 end of November, and ceases early in the spring. Last 

 winter we had in Selborne high wood about an hundred of 

 these doves ; but in former times the flocks were so vast 

 not only with us but all the district round, that on morn- 

 ings and evenings they traversed the air, like rooks, in 

 strings, reaching for a mile together. When they thus 

 rendezvous here by thousands, if they happened to be 

 suddenly roused from their roost-trees on an evening, 



" Their rising all at once was like the sound 

 Of thunder heard remote." 



It will by no means be foreign to the present purpose to 

 add, that I had a relation in this neighbourhood who made 

 it a practice for a time, whenever he could procure the eggs 

 of a ring-dove, to place them under a pair of doves that 

 were sitting in his own pigeon-house ; hoping thereby, if 

 he could bring about a coalition, to enlarge his breed, and 

 teach his own doves to beat out into the woods and to 

 support themselves by mast : the plan was plausible, but 

 something always interrupted the success ; for though the 

 birds were usually hatched, and sometimes grew to half 

 their size, yet none ever arrived at maturity. I myself 

 have seen these foundlings in their nest displaying a strange 

 ferocity of nature, so as scarcely to bear to be looked at, 

 and snapping with their bills by way of menace. In short, 

 they always died, perhaps for want of proper sustenance : 

 but the owner thought that by their fierce and wild de- 

 meanour they frighted their foster-mothers, and so were 

 starved. 



Virgil, as a familiar occurrence, by way of simile, describes 

 a dove haunting the cavern of a rock in such engaging 

 numbers, that I cannot refrain from quoting the passage : 

 and John Dryden has rendered it so happily in our 



1 Some old sportsmen say that the main part of these flocks used to 

 withdraw as soon as the heavy Christmas frosts were over. 



