A CCENTORS. 69 



the twisted ivy-boughs, seldom many feet from the ground, and here 

 it lays its five or six beautiful light blue eggs, which are so often 

 taken by nest-robbers, not with any intelligent desire to study oology 

 that is, the science of eggs or to arrange them in a cabinet, but because 

 they look pretty strung upon a string with others, and show, as the 

 owner thinks, what a clever fellow he was to find and take them. It 

 is a melancholy spectacle, these strings of grey, and brown, and white, 

 and blue, speckled and spotted, or plain little spheres, rows and rows 

 of them, many of one sort, and one wonders where the pleasure can 

 be of exhibiting such a collection, only the gratification of a childish 

 vanity, or a greed for possessing, which may afterwards develope into 

 avarice. A pair or two of each kind, arranged in a cabinet, and pro- 

 perly labelled, is a pretty and a pleasing sight; it shows that the 

 collector is a student of nature, who is cultivating at the same time 

 his love of God's creatures and his powers of observation. Sufficient 

 eggs for such a purpose, as well as a few supplementary ones, to 

 exchange with other young naturalists, may always be obtained without 

 cruelty or distress to the parent birds, who will not miss one or two 

 taken from the nest. They are generally idle and truant boys, who 

 make these large and unmeaning collections of eggs, which they ought 

 to be ashamed to look upon, and no bird suffers more from their 

 depredations than our pretty little Hedge Sparrow, whose nest is within 

 easy reach of their mischievous fingers. Besides this affliction, the 

 Dunnock has not unfrequently thrust upon it an expensive lodger, in 

 the shape of a young Cuckoo. Of course our readers all know that 

 this strange, wandering bird, whose double note they have often heard 

 in the summer woods, sounding like a far-away echo, makes no nest 

 of its own, but just goes quietly and drops one egg here and another 

 there into that of another bird, which by and bye hatches a monster, 

 almost as big as herself, that takes more food than all the rest of her 

 brood, and sometimes even with its broad back shovels them over the 

 edge of their rightful home, so that they are killed by the fall or die 

 of starvation, while the intruder gets fat upon all the produce which 

 the old birds collect for the sustenance of their family; he grows and 

 grows till he fills the whole nest, and some say even bites off the heads 

 of his foster parents, but we do not quite believe this, notwithstanding 

 that the fool in Shakespeare's play of Bang Lear says 



"The Hedge Sparrow fed the Cuckoo so long, 

 That she had her head bit off by her young," 



meaning this ravenous monster of which she was involuntarily made the 

 mother and nurse. It appears that more young Cuckoos are hatched 



