HOW KESTRELS LIVE. 
‘pHe interminable washy clouds of the gray 
sou’-wester streamed by overhead, the 
rain streamed down in heavy rushes, and 
the ground streamed, too, wherever a slight 
incline gave it a chance to do so. 
Everything had been wet through long ago. 
The little kestrel falcon, with his long tail and 
his sickle wings, his brown back and bluish 
blunt head, his very opposite to blunt, hooked 
beak, and his sheathed, aeronautical glance, 
sailed and sailed in circles over the drenched 
land, and hovered and sailed again in silence. 
He had been doing that for hours, ever 
since dawn; but he might as well have saved 
himself the trouble by the look of it, for 
nothing had he killed. 
Ordinarily, he would have lunched off field- 
voles, after a breakfast of, say, rat. He was 
now, however, too hungry to be fastidious ; 
he was ravenous, and in no mood to pick and 
choose. 
Suddenly, from among some dejected cattle, 
five dark, foreign-looking starlings got up, 
and whizzed downwind with their usual 
‘Gh-ee-e!’ of alarm; and the kestrel did 
some whizzing on his own account, too. 
S.W. Cc 
