THE HOMECOMERS 93 



At one station in Upper Italy an ordinary 

 morning's take is five hundred birds, ranging from 

 thrushes to willow-wrens. If we were to give that 

 single station an average of two hundred a day 

 throughout the season of ten weeks, it would be 

 responsible for fourteen thousand birds at each 

 migration. 



At Como and Varese ' redbreasts ' are sold not in 

 mere hundreds but by thousands in a day, their 

 price averaging from seventy-five centessimo a 

 dozen when the weather is cool to five centessimo 

 when the small bodies are not likely to keep. 



In October 1890 nearly half a million small 

 birds crossed the frontier at Brescia, not as they 

 come into Sussex in spring, on joyful wing and 

 with glad twitter of anticipation, but in indis- 

 criminate, shapeless packets of fifty, from which 

 you could pick out flycatchers, whitethroats, 

 garden-warblers, pipits, and titmice. From Udine, 

 two hundred thousand are despatched by rail ; near 

 Montegrado, fourteen thousand swallows fell in three 

 days, and ' on the stone-field Crao ' no less than 

 three million in one season. 



Perhaps the nightingale that was strangely 

 absent last summer from Honeysuckle Lane, or 

 the redstart you have missed this month from the 

 Lower Orchard, has been gobbled up in some Italian 

 polenta. On the other hand, they may have been 

 caught alive for a worse fate. Perhaps one or 

 both of them took part in one of those ' beautiful ' 

 Resurrection festivals with which the people of 



