38 OXFORD: SPEING AND SUMMER. 



every year, and doing his useful dirty work with untiring 

 diligence and appetite, lives on his noisy and quarrelsome life 

 even in the very heart of London. 



Whether the surroundings of the Oxford Sparrows have given 

 them a sense of higher things, I cannot say ; but they have ways 

 which have suggested to me that the Sparrow must at some 

 period of his existence have fallen from a higher state, of which 

 some individuals have a Platonic dra/xvijo-ts which prompts them 

 to purer walks of life. No sooner does the summer begin to 

 bring out the flies among our pollard willows, than they become 

 alive with Sparrows. There you may see them, as you repose 

 on one of the comfortable seats on the brink of the Cherwell in 

 the Parks, catching flies in the air with a vigour and address 

 which in the course of a few hundred years might almost develop 

 into elegance. Again and again I have had to turn my glass 

 upon a bird to see if it could really be a Sparrow that was 

 fluttering in the air over the water with an activity apparently 

 meant to rival that of the little Fly-catcher, who sits on a bough 

 at hand and occasionally performs the same feat with native 

 lightness and deftness. But these are for the most part young 

 Sparrows of the year, who have been brought here perhaps by 

 their parents to be out of the way of cats, and for the benefit of 

 country air and an easily-digested insect diet. How long they 

 stay here I do not know ; but before our Autumn Term begins 

 they must have migrated back to the city, for I seldom or ever 

 see them in the willows except in the Summer Term. 



These seats by the Cherwell are excellent stations for ob- 

 servation. Swallows, Martins, and Sand-martins flit over the 



