KINDNESS, AND SYMPATHIES 267 



'''January $th, 1895. 



" This part of Northamptonshire is decidedly rich 

 in birds, for an inland locality, as you will believe 

 when I tell you that a clergyman, and first-class ornitho- 

 logist, at a few miles distance told me that last May 

 he had one hundred and fifty-six nests of twenty-four 

 species in the curtilage of his vicarage, without counting 

 those of house-sparrow, but including a rookery of some 

 fifty nests. It will be a real pleasure to me if I can 

 give you any information about any special points in 

 zoology, but I must tell you that for the last nine years 

 I have been entirely crippled, and confined to a wheeled 

 chair, and therefore almost debarred from personal out- 

 door observation. I have loved and studied birds and 

 beasts since I was a child, alas ! some sixty years ago, 

 and have a fine collection of living animals here that I 

 should have great delight in showing to you." l 



"February $rd, 1895. 



" Pray do not allow any want of scientific knowledge 

 to deter you from continuing your charming writings 

 on natural history. We have a cockatoo here, that I 

 bought at Father Jamrach's in April 1867 ; he is of a 

 rare species, the great blue-eyed cockatoo of the Solomon 

 Islands. When I first had him he was delightfully tame 

 and quiet, but on coming home, after three months in 

 Spain, I found him savage, wild, and intolerably noisy, 



1 To Mrs. Owen Visger, Editor of A Son of the Marshes. 



