388 BIRD LIFE AT BINGHAM'S MELCOMBE 



bilities as hosts, remain quietly at home, ready to 

 receive their numerous, their innumerable, visitors. 

 At last, the latter rise in a body from the field, 

 sweep round and round, or rise high in the air with 

 their myriad-throated cries, and then settle down on 

 the trees reserved for them by their hosts at Warm- 

 well. Once and again, as if moved by one common 

 impulse, they all caw and chatter together in full 

 chorus, and then, with equal suddenness, relapse 

 into total silence. A stick, a leaf almost, might be 

 heard to drop in the rookery. Then, as darkness 

 comes on apace, not in one vast body, but each 

 flock by itself, and each followed by the next at a 

 definite interval of time, each of them "straight as 

 the crow flies," and each led by the ragged- winged 

 " many- wintered crow which leads the clanging 

 rookery home," they wing their way to the "rooky 

 wood," a deep, dark, and damp plantation between 

 the water-meadows and the heather, more than a 

 mile away, where they, as their fathers and their 

 fathers' fathers have done before them, rest for the 

 night. The Warmwell rooks, with the invariable 

 etiquette, the true chivalry of hospitality, always 

 remain on their own trees, till they have seen the 

 last of their guests off safely first, and then, and 

 not till then, "bethinking themselves," as Homer 



