QVJ- 



PR EFA CE. 



THERE is a frontier line to civilization in this country 

 yet, and not far outside its great centres we come 

 quickly even now on the borderland of nature. Mod- 

 ern progress, except where it has exterminated them, 

 has scarcely touched the habits of bird or animal ; so 

 almost up to the very houses of the metropolis the 

 nightingale yearly returns to her former haunts. If 

 we go a few hours' journey onty, and then step just 

 beyond the highway where the steam ploughing 

 engine has left the mark of its wide wheels on the 

 dust and glance into the hedgerow, the copse, or 

 stream, there are nature's children as unrestrained in 

 their wild, free life as they were in the veritable 

 backwoods of primitive England. So, too, in some 

 degree with the tillers of the soil : old manners and 

 customs linger, and there seems an echo of the past 

 in the breadth of their pronunciation. 



But a difficulty confronts the explorer who would 

 carry away a note of what he has seen, because 

 nature is not cut and dried to hand, nor easily classi- 

 fied, each subject shading gradually into another. In 

 studying the ways, for instance, of so common a bird 

 as the starling, it cannot be separated from the farm- 

 house in the thatch of which it often breeds, the 

 rooks with whom it associates, or the friendly sheep 

 upon whose backs it sometimes rides. Since the 

 subjects are so closely connected, it is best, perhaps, 



