66 REDBREAST. 



doubt: 'I had an opportunity,' he writes in his 

 'Gleanings in Natural History,' 'this summer of 

 witnessing the distress of a Robin when, on returning 

 to her. nest with food for her young, she discovered that 

 they had dissappeared. Her low and plaintive waitings 

 were incessant. She appeared to seek for them among 

 the neighbouring bushes, now and then changing her 

 mournful cry into one which seemed like a call to her 

 brood to come to her. She kept the food in her mouth 

 for a short time, but when she found that her cries 

 were unanswerable, let it fall to the ground.' 



'So also Virgil, though speaking of a different 

 species, in his Fourth Georgic, for Nature was the 

 same eighteen hundred years ago as she is now, 



' Quails populea maerens philomela sub umbra 

 Amissos queritur foetus, quos duros arator 

 Observans nido irnplumes dctraxit : at ilia 

 Flet noctem, ramoque sedcns, miserabile carmen 

 Integral, et mcestis late loca quaestibus implet.' 



'Thus well rendered by Dryden 



' So, close in poplar shades, her children gone, 

 The mother nightingale laments alone, 

 Whose nest some prying churl had found, and thence 

 By stealth convey 'd the unfeathered innocents: 

 But she supplies the night with mournful strains, 

 And melancholy music fills the plains.' 



