A Citizen of the World. g 



The rooks, wheeling round their windy stations in 

 the reeling elm trees, hold eager and excited conclave 

 on the havoc that storm and rain have wrought in the 

 ancient settlement. Ere long the dusky architects 

 will set to work in earnest. Ere long there will rise 

 above each long silent and deserted rookery, the 

 familiar Babel of the city in the air. 



Jackdaws sit and sun themselves on the roofs, and 

 loiter round the gables in search of quarters for the 

 season. In noisy troops they drift along the gray 

 front of the old cathedral, debating, in their clear 

 incisive way, where they shall collect the bushel or so 

 of sticks for their respective nurseries with small 

 reverence for the stony lines of saints and sovereigns 

 whose battered effigies have outlived the storms of 

 centuries, and the leaden hail of iconoclast bullets. 



But more striking still, visible everywhere, audible 

 on every side, proclaiming to all whom it may concern 

 that he is in want of a wife, there sings on every house- 

 top the light-hearted and irrepressible starling. He is 

 an odd-looking figure as he stands up there at the end 

 of the gable, or on the top of his favourite chimney 

 now crooning his own quaint runes ; now singing a 

 mellow stave copied from thrush or blackbird ; now 

 whistling like any plough-boy, with his head thrown 

 back, and shaking now and then his drooping wings, 

 looking for all the world like an old gentleman with 

 his hands under his coat-tails, laying down the law in 

 the family circle. 



