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came and inspected him, and was evidently satisfied, as 

 both the parents retired and we saw them no more. The 

 young bird was placed in comfortable quarters for the 

 night, but it must have been injured, for it was dead in 

 the morning. The sequel is pathetic, for the parents 

 whose nest is not in our garden ceaselessly search and 

 call for their missing young one. Are not such bravery 

 and devotion unusual? 



PERCY CREED. 



August 2, 1919. 



PHILOPROGENITIVE FRENZY 



In the Spectator of August 31 Mr. Geo. Smith wrote 

 under the above heading, and asked whether a family of 

 six cygnets is not an unusually large number. I do not 

 think it is indeed, a pair of swans near to where I am 

 writing has seven, and last year the same pair had six 

 cygnets ; but in regard to your editorial footnote to his 

 letter, in which you express " wonder whether the pride 

 of the cock bird is actually in the magnitude of his 

 family." I can produce facts which will answer your 

 inquiry, and may be of interest to some of your readers. 

 Once when staying at Weymouth, I took the opportunity 

 of visiting the swannery at Abbotsbury, which, lying as 

 it does at the back of the Chesil Bank of shingle, is not far 

 from the island of Portland. Here there were, at the 

 time of my visit, somewhere near a thousand of these 

 stately birds, the piece of water and the adjacent marsh 

 allotted to them being upon property belonging to the Earl 

 of Ilchester, and dating, tradition says, from the time of 

 the Saxon Kings. It happened that I went there in the 

 height of the breeding season, when the marsh was 

 studded over with hillocks raised by the birds as their 

 nests ; on each, from which the occupants had not already 

 hatched their brood and taken them to the adjacent sheet 

 of water, was a sitting swan. I noticed that amongst 



