198 THE SLEEPING HOMES OF ANIMALS 



the bare whitewashed top of the portico, there were no 

 cosy corners, and at eighteen inches from the sparrow 

 was the gas-lit portico-lamp. There every evening it 

 slept, and guests leaving the house seldom failed to 

 look up and see the little bird fast asleep in its 

 enormous white bedroom. Its regular return during 

 two winters is evidence that it regarded this as its 

 home ; but why did it choose this particular portico in 

 place of a hundred others in the same square ? 



It is a ' far cry ' from South Kensington to the 

 Southern cliffs ; but the same sense of home which 

 brought the sparrow back nightly to his London 

 portico brings the cormorants and the falcons to the 

 same spot in the same precipice, year after year, in the 

 Culver Cliffs. There is a certain vaulted niche, in 

 which the peregrine falcons sleep, winter and summer, 

 in the white wall of the precipice, and every night at 

 dusk the cormorants fly in to sleep on their special 

 shelves and pedestals on another portion of the cliff. 

 They come to these few square yards of perpendicular 

 chalk, three hundred feet above the surge, as constantly 

 as the fishermen return to their cottages at the Foreland. 

 They regard this sleeping-place as their fixed and certain 

 home, where, safe from gun, cragsman, or cliff-fox, they 

 can sleep till sunrise sends them hungry to their business 

 of fishing. But of all animal sleeping-places, caves and 

 caverns are most remarkable for ancient and distinguished 



