NUNBURNHOLME 45 



grass near the water's edge, looking up at you the 

 while with their soft black eyes, till a slight motion 

 on your part sends them like a flash headlong into 

 the stream ; and for an occasional treat you may 

 hear the wild cry of the heron as it drops down by 

 the water-side at no great distance off in search of a 

 trout or some smaller fry. For many years after my 

 father came to Nunburnholme you could seldom 

 walk half-a-mile down the beck without seeing a 

 kingfisher or two ; now you may think yourself 

 lucky if you meet with three or four in a year, so 

 ruthlessly have they been destroyed in the lower 

 reaches of the stream. In the winter-time, when 

 other brooks were frozen, our little beck was the 

 haunt of many a snipe and wild duck, though these, 

 alas ! are not so frequent as of yore ; and the dipper, 

 though rarely seen even forty years ago, is now quite 

 a thing of the past, so far as the Nunburnholme beck 

 is concerned. 



Happily there is no lack of trees and shrubs in 

 the Rectory garden. These are the haunts of count- 

 less birds of the commoner sorts, such as sparrows, 

 blackbirds, thrushes, chaffinches, robins, dunnocks, 

 wrens, starlings, and others ; while in years past the 

 boughs of the yew-trees have given a building-place 

 for our smallest bird, the golden-crested wren, as 

 well as for the pleasant-voiced wood-pigeon. Hun- 

 dreds of families of martins have been reared from 

 year to year under the eaves of the Rectory, and 

 many generations of swallows have found nesting- 

 places for themselves within the boundaries of the 



