6 London Birds. 



corner, the picture of dejection till, if the snakes 

 are hungry, there is a sudden flutter, and the 

 miserable party scuttle over to another corner, one 

 short in numbers ; and one may see a little bunch of 

 feathers, at all sorts of impossible angles, peeping out 

 from a coil of scales. The stroke is almost quicker 

 than the eye can follow. 



London Sparrows evidently look upon Corinthian 

 capitals as designed for their especial convenience 

 in the nesting season; and Bishop Stanley tells of 

 one pair which had the impertinence to build in 

 the mouth of the lion on Northumberland House, 

 long ago departed to the limbo of forgotten land- 

 marks where Copenhagen and the "big" Duke on 

 the Arch have since joined him. When the Duke's 

 statue was taken down for removal to Aldershot, in 

 1884, it was found that more than one bird like 

 Gavroche in the plaster elephant of the Place de la 

 Bastille had set up house inside. There was a 

 Sparrow's nest with a newly hatched young bird, 

 and several eggs in the right arm ; and, in the elbow 

 of the left, a nestful of young Starlings almost 

 fledged. 



The front door of both establishments was a hole 

 in one of the hands. 



With all its ragged untidiness, few things are 

 grander in suggestion than a Sparrow's nest on 

 Westminster Abbey or St. Paul's. It carries one 

 back to the days when the author of the Eighty- 

 fourth Psalm watched the birds building in the 

 niches of Solomon's temple or, more probably 

 looked back on with the eye of memory only from 

 exile by the waters of Babylon and wrote, in words 

 which have still all the freshness of three thousand 

 years ago, " The Sparrow hath found an house, and 



