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starling. Those that annually change, building one 

 year in the larch and another in the holly, or forsaking 

 the primrose bank for the garden wall, move within 

 a narrow area and still have a fixed home. If you 

 catch a sparrow with a white feather in his wing (so 

 that you may know him the more easily) and carry 

 him to a distant county, you will find, if he stays 

 in the neighbourhood (as probably he will), that 

 the natives are continually chasing and pecking him, 

 and that as like as not his death is the end of your 

 experiment. Thus it would seem that not man alone 

 has mapped out the world in territory, and district, 

 and parish, but that his poor relations also have their 

 frontiers. Such phenomena as the occurrence on 

 small islands of species unknown to the neighbouring 

 continent is proof positive that a bird is naturally a 

 stay-at-home : that he uses the power of locomotion 

 only upon compulsion of hunger or cold. 



The oak on the hillside is anchored by his roots ; 

 but the rabbits that play under his boughs, howbeit 

 free to wander at will, are really held within a small 

 circumference by their affection for the burrow where 

 they live. Their comrades, too, have each a centre 

 round which to circle. Your walk across the meadow 

 and over the cornfield and into the plantation winds 

 past a hundred homes. The field-mouse has his neat 

 and tiny hole, the diminutive paths and highways all 

 about it worn by the patter of his feet, and showing with 

 what slender freedom he walks when, daring weasel 



