NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 53 



Your approbation, with regard to my new discovery of the 

 migration of the ring-ousel, gives me satisfaction ; and I find 

 you concur with me in suspecting that they are foreign birds 

 which visit us. You will be sure, I hope, not to omit to make 

 inquiry whether your ring-ousels leave your rocks in the 

 autumn. What puzzles me most, is the very short stay they 

 make with us ; for in 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 



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. G. C. D. 



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 country. And perhaps, Norfolk excepted, 

 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 wor- 

 ship make little better appearance than dovecots. When I 

 first saw Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdon- 

 shire, and the fens of Lincolnshire, I was amazed at the number 



