THREE BIRDS 33 



and he shows small sign of nervousness. The cock 

 wren, when the building mania is on him, will almost 

 build in your hat. Nevertheless, he seldom comes into 

 the house, except in great stress of weather, and rarely 

 visits even the bird table. Happily there are exceptions. 

 Into a lovely house in Wiltshire (whose owner confesses 

 to &quot; house-pride &quot;) a wren has been making its way daily, 

 however small the slit in the open window. It spends 

 most of its time in slipping along the skirting boards, so 

 quickly and neatly that you may scarcely be sure whether 

 it is running or flying. It seems that even in the best- 

 kept house there are more bits of flies, more disjecta 

 membra, than on the untidiest tree trunk; and such 

 almost microscopic atoms are the favourite food of the 

 wren. His long, slender beak has small dealing with 

 such gross and tough objects as a grass seed or as the 

 bits of bread or porridge that we put out on our tables. 

 If on its attempted retreat it finds the window shut it 

 utters a sharp cry at intervals until one of its servants 

 opens the offending pane. 



3- 



As we motored through Cambridgeshire on the loth 

 January, the farmers were still carting their roots of 

 sugar to the factories, or piling them beside the road 

 for other transport ; and this indicates that the &quot; hun 

 dred days campaign,&quot; sometimes now spoken of in 

 England as long ago in France, often continues beyond 

 its normal term, and incidentally has added much to 

 the vividness as to the economics of village life. Some 

 of the roots must have been carted, you would say, 

 during the gales which, though the winds were westerly, 

 swept with no little force across the flat plains of East 



