LONDON BIKDS 39 



scarcely still for a moment together. It is amusing, in 

 a general scramble for bread from the bridge, to watch 

 them diving under the ruck, and popping up to snatch 

 a crust from the very mouth of some sleepy fellow 

 twice their own size, hunted in turn by half a dozen 

 others as wide-awake as themselves. 



Birds are many of them gifted with the lively 

 imagination which can keep a child happily amused 

 for an hour at a time with a cork on a bit of string for 

 a dog, or ' pretenting to be mother.' 



A year or two ago one of the Bernicle Geese in St. 

 James's Park no doubt with a history behind her and 

 not improbably with a shot in the ovary to remind her 

 of some ' hair-breadth 'scape ' on a frozen marsh in by- 

 gone days made a nest, and, without laying an egg, 

 sat the regulation number of weeks on nothing more 

 suggestive of goslings than the down from her own 

 breast with which she had carefully lined it. 



The next year, a second nest was made in the same 

 spot, but this time the Providence which makes the 

 woman, to whom such family delights had seemed im- 

 possible, to keep house and be a joyful mother of 

 children, stepped in in the person of the keeper with 

 a clutch of Ducks' eggs, which were safely hatched. 

 For some reason or other the ducklings did not thrive 

 perhaps because the old maid was too fussily anxious 

 and gave them no peace, or, perhaps (as the keeper 

 who watched them believed to be the case), because her 

 sharp note jarred on ears which nature had designed 

 for a mother's call in another key, frightening the poor 



