POLYGLOT ANIMALS 213 



a certain degree of sympathy between themselves and 

 their keepers. If comparatively few words convey any 

 meaning to most animals, the tones of the human 

 voice are almost certainly as intelligible to them as 

 many animal sounds are to us. The purring of a 

 cat could scarcely be mistaken for an expression of 

 anything but pleasure by a person quite unacquainted 

 with the species or its voice, and the anxious notes 

 of many birds when calling their young are so ex- 

 pressive that a sympathetic listener can easily interpret 

 their meaning. Last summer a friend of the writer's 

 picked up a newly hatched water-hen which had 

 somehow been separated from the rest of its family 

 and wandered a considerable distance from the lake- 

 side where it had been hatched. The rescuer was 

 anxious to return it to its mother without delay, 

 but no trace of the nest or old bird could then be 

 discovered. So the chick, which was weak with cold 

 and hunger, was carried up to the house and fed with 

 raw egg, which it sucked off the tip of a paint-brush 

 with evident satisfaction. A couple of hours later, 

 when it was taken down to the lake again, a bird 

 was heard calling in the rushes. The sound was 

 unfamiliar, and quite unlike the ordinary call of a 

 moorhen ; there were also several other species of 

 water-fowl nesting on the lake to which it might 

 have been attributed. But the note was so unmis- 

 takably that of a distressed mother-bird calling its 

 young that the identity of the caller was at once 

 suspected. It was carefully " stalked," and proved, 

 as we had supposed, to be the mother moorhen ; so 



