TITS, OR TITMICE. 9 



altered now; 'our criminals are rarely executed, and we put them out 

 of sight as soon as possible, as things too loathesome and horrible to 

 be looked on. But the joyous and innocent birds knew nothing of 

 crime and its consequences, and to them the skeleton's head was as 

 good a place to nest in as any other hollow space. Nothing did they 

 know of the thoughts that once passed through those chambers of the 

 brain, of the guilty terrors that must have had a place there, and 

 dared not go forth into the sunshine, as the happy birds did, and 

 return gladly to their home and waiting offspring. 



A very gay bird is Master Blue-cap,~as to dress, we mean; blue of 

 various shades is the prevailing colour. It is streaked and banded 

 with white, varied with yellow, which deepens at places into green and 

 brown; he is quite a beau in his small way. About half an ounce 

 being his weight, and four inches and a half his length; a bold, 

 lively, and most interesting bird, a great friend to the farmers and 

 gardeners, although they cannot be brought to believe this, but shoot 

 him without mercy, and have sometimes offered a reward of so much 

 per dozen for Tomtit's heads, forgetting that so persevering a des- 

 troyer of insects cannot, be other than a friend to them, although he 

 may sometimes help himself to some of their seeds, and fruit, and 

 green stuffs. Mr. Knapp, in his " Journal of a Naturalist/' mentions 

 that "An item passed in one of a late churchwarden's accounts was 

 for seventeen dozen of Tomtit's heads;" and a close observer has 

 estimated that a pair of these birds, while feeding their young, destroyed 

 six or seven hundred insects in the course of a single day. Suppose 

 they do this for a month only, taking the lowest of the above num- 

 bers, we have 18,000, that is 9,000 to each bird; multiply that by the 

 number of birds whose heads were barbarously wrung off, and igno- 

 rantly paid for, we have an army of devastation amounting to 206,000 

 which these poor slaughtered Tits would probably have killed, if they 

 had been suffered to live. Let oar agricultural and horticultural 

 friends think upon this, and 



Spare the Tits, the sprightly birds, 



The insect hunters, never weary; 

 They can but chirp, they have no words 



To plead themselves, but, ever cheery, 

 They flit and flutter where they can, 

 Still doing good, and helping man. 



