GROWS. 53 



Rooks have a peculiar aptitude for selecting for their 

 home a spot of dignity and beauty. They are always asso- 

 ciated with stateliness and repose. No one ever found their 

 nests in a disreputable spot such as a gooseberry bush for 

 instance, where we have known a magpie to build among 

 the stony curls of a heroic statue like ribald jackdaws, or 

 even among chimney stacks with the storks. Just as en- 

 gravers give a little "local colour " to an Indian etching by 

 bringing in a palm or two, and accentuate Arabian sands 

 by a camel in the background, so an English artist never 

 finishes up his cathedral precincts or surroundings of a ruined 

 manse without throwing in the nucleus of a rookery and a 

 bird or so coming home with sunset. No doubt these birds 

 have built in the plane trees of Cheapside, where, by the 

 way, kites built only a hundred years ago, in Gray's Inn 

 Gardens, and in a few such other places, but this does not 

 spoil the argument. Where we find them most numerous 

 and available for sport is in the avenues leading to lordly 

 mansions throughout the shires, and in the great elms that 

 the foresight of our ancestor planted behind grange and 

 castle to keep off the north wind, and to shame, perhaps, 

 shallow, sceptical descendants, who live as if their lives 

 marked the bounds of time, and who, cutting down, plant 

 nothing for those who come after. 



There are countless traditions regarding the cunning and 

 feudal instincts of the rook. No money-lender ever had 

 a greater interest in the succession of great estates than 

 these sable retainers of long-settled families. One authority 

 tells us gravely they will desert a rookery that is about to 

 change human ownership, and that a tenantless mansion 

 where familiar faces have once been they abhor. Foresters 

 more prosaically aver they can tell when an elm has the wet 

 rot even sooner than the woodpecker, their distant relative. 

 To bark their trees will drive them away, and so may a ring 

 of paint round the bole, as surely as though with human eyes 

 they associated that fatal mark with axes and woodmen. 



