THE ROBIN REDBREAST 
pleasant mansion was being built, a pair of 
robins, having successfully brought up one 
family in one of the unfinished rooms, actu- 
ally reared a second brood in a hole made for 
a scaffold-pole, though the sitting bird, 
being immediately beneath a plank on which 
the plasterers stood at work, was repeatedly 
splashed with mortar ! The egg of the robin 
is subject to considerable variety of type. 
I think it was the late Lord Lilford who, 
speaking on the subject of a Bill for the 
protection of wild birds' eggs, then before 
the House of Lords, gave it as his belief 
that no ornithologist of repute would swear 
to the name of a single British bird's egg 
without positively seeing one or other of 
the parent birds fly off the nest. This was, 
perhaps, a little overstating the difficulty of 
evidence, since any schoolboy with a fancy 
for birds-nesting might without hesitation 
identify such pronounced types as those of 
the chaffinch, with its purple blotches, the 
song-thrush with its black spots on a blue 
ground, or the nightingale, which resembles 
a miniature olive. Eggs, on the other hand, 
like those of the house sparrow, redshank 
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