PREFACE. 
THERE is a frontier line to civilization in this country 
yet, and not far outside its great centres we come 
quickly even now on the borderland of nature. 
Modern progress, except where it has exterminated 
them, has scarcely touched the habits of bird or 
animal; so almost up to the very houses of the 
metropolis the nightingale yearly returns to her 
former haunts. If we go a few hours’ journey only, 
and then step just beyond the highway—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 they 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 difficulty confronts the explorer who would 
carry away a note of what he has seen, because nature 
is not cut and dried to hand, nor easily classified, each 
subject shading gradually into another. In studying 
the ways, for instance, of so common a bird as the 
