128 A Midland Village: Garden and Meadow. 



times more bulky, than the egg of the Cuckoo. 

 This is the Nuthatch, which will carry away from 

 a window any number of hard dessert nuts, and 

 store them up in all sorts of holes and corners, 

 where they are sometimes found still unbroken. 

 These plump and neat little birds, whose bills 

 and heads and necks seem all of a piece, while 

 their bodies and tails are not of much account, 

 have been for years accustomed to come for their 

 dinners to my neighbour's windows. 1 One day 

 while sitting with my friend, Col. Barrow, F.R.S. 

 (to whom the Oxford Museum is indebted for a 

 most valuable present of Arctic Birds), we set 

 the Nuthatches a task which at first puzzled them. 

 After letting them carry off a number of nuts 

 in the usual way, we put the nuts into a glass 

 tumbler. The birds arrived, they saw the nuts, 

 and tried to get at them, but in vain. Some 

 invisible obstacle was in the way ; they must have 

 thought it most uncanny. They poked and 

 prodded, and departed aTrpaxro). Again they 



1 Col. Barrow tells me that now (August, 1886) they have 

 come to prefer bread to nuts, and will leave the latter so long 

 as they can get the former. 



