98 THOSE OTHER ANIMALS. 



numbers man does not grudge him the small share he 

 claims, but when his numbers are legion it becomes another 

 matter. The farmer regards his stacks and his crops as 

 his private property, and when myriads of sparrows demand 

 toll the agriculturist is apt to become rusty. He sees the 

 sparrow only on his predaceous side, and has no leisure 

 to investigate his amiable qualities. The few insects the 

 sparrow may destroy in his leisure moments weigh but little 

 in the farmer's mind as against the loss of his crops of 

 cherries, the general destruction of his peas, or a wholesale 

 raid upon his corn stacks, and so he betakes himself to net 

 and gun. This would seem hard upon the sparrow ; but he 

 has no right to take it amiss, for it is his own habit to wage 

 a war of extermination against other birds wherever he 

 obtains a footing. The native birds of North America are 

 rapidly disappearing before the army of sparrows that have 

 sprung from the few hundreds sent out to cope with the 

 caterpillar which devastated the trees in the parks and 

 open spaces in New York just as the aborigines of the 

 country have been almost wiped out by the Anglo-Saxon 

 settlers. Even in this country he is fast driving out other 

 and more useful birds ; the tits and the finches abandon 

 neighbourhoods where he abounds, and the house martin 

 has almost disappeared from some localities. The conse- 

 quences of this tyrannical conduct will, in the long run, 

 recoil upon the sparrow himself. With the decrease of the 

 insect-feeding birds, the pests of our fields and gardens will 

 so multiply that, in self-defence, a crusade against the sparrow 

 will be organised in all rural districts. The movement 

 has, indeed, already begun in many localities, and in the 

 future we may expect the sparrow to leave the country 



