The Travellei's 225 



speak of him as the Grasset, the champion fat 

 bird. The name in itself fully describes his 

 leading characteristic. No other achieves such 

 a degree of obesity. A moment comes when, 

 laden with pads of fat up to its wings, its neck 

 and the back of its head, the bird looks like a 

 little pat of butter. The poor thing can hardly 

 flutter from one mulberry-tree to the next, 

 where it stops to pant in the thick leafage, half 

 choked with melting fat, a martyr to its passion 

 for Weevils. 



October brings us the slender White Wagtail, 

 half pearly grey, half white, with a large black- 

 velvet chest-protector. The graceful little bird, 

 trotting along and cocking up its tail, follows 

 the ploughman almost under the horses' feet 

 and picks the grubs in the new-turned furrow. 

 About the same time the Skylark arrives, first 

 in little companies sent out as scouting-parties, 

 next in countless battalions, which take pos- 

 session of the cornfields and fallow land, with 

 their plentiful setaria-seeds, the bird's usual 

 fare. Then, in the plain, amid the universal 

 glitter of dewdrops and rime-crystals hanging 

 from every blade of grass, the treacherous 

 mirror shoots forth its intermittent flashes in 

 the rays of the morning sun ; then the little 

 Owl, released by the hunter's hand, makes his 

 short flight, alights, starts up again convulsively, 



p 



