226 WATERTON'S FAVOURITE. 



and as Cowper, who has written some lines on the incident, 

 relates : 



Then perching at his consort's side, 



Was briskly borne along ; 

 The billows and the blast defied, 



And cheered her with a song. 



With Waterton the Chaffinch is a prime favourite ; and 

 he has given such a graphic picture of its habits, that we 

 are tempted to quote a considerable portion of it : 



Amongst all the pretty warblers which flirt from bush to bush 

 before me, as I wander through the flowery fields, next to poor Cock 

 Robin, the Chaffinch is my favourite bird. I see him almost at 

 every step. He is in the fruit and forest trees, and in the lowly 

 hawthorn ; he is on the house-top, and on the ground close to your 

 feet. You may observe him on the stack-bar, and on the dung-hill, 

 on the king's highway, in the fallow-field, in the meadow, in the 

 pasture, and by the margin of the stream. 



If his little pilferings on the beds of early radishes alarm you for the 

 return of the kitchen garden, think, I pray you, how many thousands 

 of seeds he consumes, which otherwise would be carried by the 

 wind into your choicest quarters of cultivation, and would spring up 

 there most sadly to your cost. Think again of his continual service 

 at your barn-door, where he lives throughout the winter, chiefly on 

 the unprofitable seeds, which would cause you endless trouble were 

 they allowed to lie in the straw, and to be carried out with it into 

 the land on the approach of spring. 



His nest is a paragon of perfection. He attaches lichen to the 

 outside of it by means of the spider's slender web. In the year 

 1805, when I was on a plantation in Guiana, I saw the Humming 

 Bird making use of the spider's web in its nidification, and then 

 the thought struck me that our Chaffinch might probably make use 

 of it too. On my return to Europe, I watched a Chaffinch busy at 

 its nest; it left it, and flew to an old wall, took a cobweb from it, 

 then conveyed it to its nest, and interwove it with the lichen on 

 the outside of it. Four or five eggs are the usual number which 

 the Chaffinch's nest contains, and sometimes only three. The thorn, 

 and most of the evergreen shrubs, the sprouts on the boles of forest 

 trees, the woodbine, the whin, the wild rose, and occasionally the 

 bramble, are this bird's favourite places of nidification. Like all 

 its congeners it never covers its eggs on retiring from the nest, for 

 its young are hatched blind. 



There is something peculiarly pleasing to me in the song of this 

 bird. Perhaps association of ideas may add a trifle to the value of 

 its melody, for when I hear the first note of the Chaffinch, I know 



