PREFACE ix 



uninviting prison of a glass case. It is conversant 

 with birds in the freshness of the prime, in their 

 noon-tide dreams, in their renewed activity at the 

 approach of evening. If it, in any degree, answers 

 its purpose, it will take my readers, some of them, 

 perhaps, for the first time in a newly awakened love 

 for the subject even as it has taken me back, as 

 I have been writing in my study, in imagination 

 and in happy memories to the barn or to the bel- 

 fry, to the marsh or to the meadow, to the heather 

 or to the bracken, to the cosiest corner in the 

 thatched roof, or to the barren ledges of the rifted 

 rock, to the tangled thickets of the common, or to 

 the "bare backs of the bushless downs." Above 

 all, it will take them to the deep silence of the 

 solemn oak or pine woods, or to those clumps of 

 weather-beaten Scotch firs, which in Dorset more, 

 I think, than in most counties, crown the knolls or 

 hilltops, form the main landmarks on the horizon, 

 bind, with invisible cords, the most widely scattered 

 portions of the county, each to each, and, with 

 their dreamy outlook on the centuries of the past, 

 perhaps also on the centuries of the future, awake, 

 in those who know and love them well, " thoughts 

 that do often lie too deep for tears." It deals with 



the homes and haunts of birds, their times and 



a 2 



