&* NATURAL HISTORY 



than the \vhisper of this little bird, which seems to be 

 close by, though at a hundred yards distance; and, 

 when close at your ear, is scarce any louder than when 

 a great way off. Had I not been a little acquainted 

 with insects, and known that the grasshopper kind is 

 not yet hatched, I should have hardly believed but that 

 it had been a Locusta whispering in the bushes. The 

 country people laugh when you tell them that it is the 

 note of a bird. It is a most artful creature, sculking in 

 the thickest part of a bush ; and will sing at a yard 

 distance, provided it be concealed. I was obliged to 

 get a person to go on the other side of the hedge where 

 it haunted ; and then it would run, creeping like a 

 mouse, before us for a hundred yards together, through 



allied to those which visit our island, but has never been found further 

 north. 





QfILL- LEATHERS OF TKHMINCK'l WREN. 



Nest of an unknown Warbler. Two years ago I perceived in the foik 

 of a young willow, by the side of the brook Crimple, very near my house 

 at Spofforth, a nest with one egg in it. I did not touch it, expecting that 

 the bird to which the nest belonged would continue laying, but it was 

 deserted, and I could never discover the birds which constructed it. A 

 nest of the sedge warbler, Sylvia Phragmitis, was placed in a situation 

 exactly similar about twenty yards from it ; but the deserted nest differed 

 in being much deeper, and constructed with many feathers of the barn- 

 door cock, and the egg was longer and more acute than those of the 

 sedge warbler, and entirely free from spots, being of the same colour as 

 the ground of the sedge birds without the markings. The purselike 

 depth of the nest would agree with the form of the nest of Sylv. arundi- 

 nacea, the reed warbler, which I have not been able to discover in 

 Yorkshire, but all the accounts of that bird represent its eggs to be 

 spotted. It was certainly the nest of some aquatic warbler, but of all the 

 species whose propagation has been ascertained the eggs appear to be 

 spotted. I find no account of the eggs of Sylv. Cetti, the bouscarle of 

 the French, of which Temminck states, without quoting his authority, 

 that some individuals have been killed in England, and that it is apt to 

 be confounded with the reed warbler. The bouscarle is however said to 



