A PARLIAMENT 307 



very numerous anywhere, and, of course, they are 

 nowhere numerous now. But I have heard of 

 certain woods, in parts of the country where Nature 

 is allowed pretty well to have her way, and I know 

 of one such myself, which, for obvious reasons, shall 

 be nameless, a small fir plantation on high ground in 

 Somersetshire, to which if you go, towards dusk, 

 any evening between June and February, you will 

 see family after family of magpies drifting in from 

 great distances, till there are, perhaps, eighty or a 

 hundred individuals, and the whole plantation seems 

 alive with their curracking. When morning comes, 

 the convocation is dissolved, and they go off in their 

 families, as the rooks and starlings do in their flocks, 

 each to their happy hunting-grounds, a remarkable 

 combination in birds of tribal and of family life. 



In one part of Dorsetshire, which shall also be 

 nameless, the magpie is, to this day, a general favourite 

 except with the gamekeeper. So numerous are they 

 in that region, that in one plantation which forms 

 their nightly resort from all the surrounding country, 

 a gamekeeper told Mr Hudson, in his wanderings, 

 that, with a friend to help him, he had killed thirty 

 in a single evening, as they came down to roost. 



On the wide expanse of Puddletown or " Egdon " 

 Heath, which I described, in a previous article, as 



