Wild Life in London 85 



humane to wring their necks and humane to make 

 the capture of them penal. Now, the country urchin 

 who fills his father's aviary is cruel in a very different 

 fashion. He wages war with everything that flies or 

 runs. He goes forth on his rambles armed with a dry 

 bough for the field-mouse that will dart across his 

 path through the plantation, for the weasel he hopes 

 to see peeping from out the nettles, for the vole in the 

 willows by the brook. His pockets are crammed 

 with missiles for any and every bird. The lark's 

 music will insure him no immunity should he light 

 for a moment on the dry dyke ; the guileful tomtit, 

 fluttering and tumbling to wile the young hunter 

 from her nest, is as like as not to tempt forth a stone 

 that will make her a cripple in earnest ; if two robins, 

 as they often will do, get squabbling under the elms, 

 if a patrol of sparrows make a free shindy of it, his 

 glory and delight it is to lay the dirdum in his well- 

 known pleasant and fatal way. But it is the mistake 

 of ' dicky-bird ' sentimentalists to suppose that he is 

 therefore a common savage. On the contrary, it is 

 only a natural outcome of the hunting instinct ; and 

 as long as the sparrow hawks at the bee, and the 

 robin waits for the spider, and the rat murders the 

 mouse, and the stoat creeps on the leveret, it does 

 not seem that any of them have just cause of com- 

 plaint. 



But let this same boy light on a nest of birds or 

 squirrels, and he straightway develops a tenderness 



