14 THE BIRDS OF CALCUTTA. 



in a verandah, at fiist in Older to eat the seed supplied 

 to them ; soon, however, he passed from petty 

 larceny to murder, and was ultimately executed. 



No doubt Pies, even more than crows, act as a 

 healthy check on the exuberant domesticity of Philip 

 Sparrow, which would otherwise overflow in those 

 arboreal colonies in which his soul dehghts in safer 

 locahties than Calcutta, But Mag cannot be a very 

 dangerous neighbour to most small birds, seeing 

 that they flourish so well ia our midst in spite of her 

 presence and presumably not altogether disinterested 

 enquiries into the progress of their home and family 

 arrangements. She has no particular ill-wishers 

 herself, for birds of the crow kind are seldom attacked 

 by others, unless it be by the larger owls who steal 

 upon them under cover of darkness ; but the king- 

 <!row, in exercise of his office of supervisor of all 

 doubtful characters in the feathered world, has been 

 seen to harry her, cUnging to her tail and being thus 

 towed along for some distance. Whatever be the 

 cause, although our Indian Magpie favours thorny 

 twigs for building with, she does not, like the Euro- 

 pean bird, construct a domei with them over her 

 nest, but sticks to the usual corvine pattern of an 

 open cup. In the matter of eggs, however, she 

 boldly defies convention, for she will have them 

 with the pale ground colour tinted either pink or green,. 



