A MORE OR LESS HAPPY FAMILY 283 



Never again, we said, would the greedy young bird 

 behave in the unmannerly way which had brought 

 so terrible a castigation upon him ! The coot is cer- 

 tainly a good mother who does not spoil her child by 

 sparing the rod. And this is the bird which our com- 

 parative anatomists, after pulling it to pieces, tell us is 

 a small-brained, unintelligent creature ; and which old 

 Michael Drayton, who, being a poet, ought to have 

 known better, described as " a formal brainless ass " ! 



To come back to the Itchen birds. The little group, 

 or happy family, I have described was but one of the 

 many groups of the same kind existing all along the 

 river ; and these separate groups, though at a distance 

 from each other, and not exactly on visiting terms, 

 each being jealous of its own stretch of water, yet 

 kept up a sort of neighbourly intercourse in their 

 own way. Single cries were heard at all times from 

 different points ; but once or two or three times in the 

 day a cry of a coot or a moor-hen would be responded 

 to by a bird at a distance ; then another would take it 

 up at a more distant point, and another still, until 

 cries answering cries would be heard all along the 

 stream. At such times the voice of the skulking water- 

 rail would be audible too, but whether this excessively 

 secretive bird had any social relations with the others 

 beyond joining in the general greeting and outcry I 

 could not discover. Thus, all these separate little 

 groups, composed of three different species, were like 

 the members of one tribe or people broken up into 



