322 THE MAGPIE 



One other instance I can adduce, and that, as 

 it seems to me, the most curious of them all. A 

 male sparrow-hawk has, for thirty years past, been 

 observed, almost night by night, to come to roost on 

 the sill of a blocked up window in the house of my 

 friend, Mr Edward Woodhouse, in the adjoining 

 village of Ansty. He comes in shortly before dusk 

 in the evening, and leaves as soon as it gets light in the 

 morning. He has never been known to linger there 

 by day, nor has he ever, for all these years, been 

 seen with a mate. He has been carefully protected 

 by his kind host while roosting. He is a lodger who 

 will never be evicted, and yet has never paid for his 

 lodgings, except by an occasional swoop, true to his 

 name, on one of the all too numerous house sparrows 

 which haunt the spot. What led him first to adopt a 

 solitary life ; how he came to select so strange a place 

 for his nightly retreat ; how he has managed to 

 escape the many dangers that beset him on an estate 

 which is so strictly " preserved" ; above all, how he 

 has managed to prolong his life so far beyond the 

 term usually assigned to birds these are questions 

 which it is easier to ask than to answer. Can it be 

 that he has lived so long, chiefly because he is a 

 celibate, because, relieved, as he is, from the cares of 

 a wife and a family, annually renewed, he has been 



