BEDTIME. 323 



Of course, there are shrubberies and shrub- 

 beries. Those that are most favoured as the 

 haunts of animated nature are the noble belts 

 of evergreens round many of our English country 

 seats those ancient demesnes where the hollies 

 and yews, laurels and myrtles, are a century old 

 or more, and well sprinkled with a thick growth 

 of deciduous underwood, amongst which are 

 studded numerous oaks and elms, sycamores and 

 ash trees, in which a rookery has generally been 

 established for many generations. Memory re- 

 calls many such chosen spots, and doubtless the 

 reader knows of others within his own experience 

 each and all the favoured retreat of bird life 

 in winter. One of these noble shrubberies with 

 which I am specially familiar stands on a gently 

 sloping hillside in Derbyshire, almost within sight 

 of the flaming furnaces of the Sheffield steel- 

 makers. It is a wood and a shrubbery combined ; 

 tall trees with a thick undergrowth of evergreens 

 and deciduous shrubs, such as hazel, elder, white- 

 thorn, and sapling sycamores and elms the 

 whole forming a thick, dense cover and shelter, 

 which all the year round is a great attraction for 

 birds, but especially so in cold and severe weather. 

 Amongst this luxuriant growth of vegetation the 

 summer birds are in their glory. Shy Warblers 

 rear their young where the bending hazels kiss 

 the stream ; Wood Wrens flit among the tree-tops; 

 Spotted Flycatchers revel in the open glades. 

 But now these summer migrants are far beyond 



Y 2 



