PREFACE. 



There is a frontier line to civilization in this country 

 3-et, and not far outside its great centres we come 

 quickly even now on the borderland of nature. jMod- 

 ern progress, except where it has exterminated them, 

 has scarcel}' touched the habits of bird or animal ; so 

 almost up to the very houses of the metropolis the 

 nightingale .yearl}' returns to her former haunts. If 

 we go a few hours' journe}' only, and then step just 

 be^'ond the highwaj' — where the steam ploughing 

 engine has left the mark of its wide wheels on the 

 dust — and glance into the hedgerow, the copse, or 

 stream, there are nature's children as unrestrained in 

 their wild, free life as the}' were in the veritable 

 backwoods of primitive England. So, too, in some 

 degree with the tillers of the soil : old manners and 

 customs linger, and there seems an echo of the past 

 in the breadth of their pronunciation. 



But a difficult}' confronts the explorer who would 

 carr}' away a note of what he has seen, because 

 nature is not cut and dried to hand, nor easih" classi- 

 lied, each subject shading graduall}- into another. In 

 studying the ways, for instance, of so common a bird 

 as the starling, it cannot be separated from the farm- 

 house in the thatch of which it often breeds, the 

 rooks with whom it associates, or the friendl}' sheep 

 upon whose backs it sometimes rides. Since the 

 subjects are so closely connected, it is best, perhaps, 



