A fai r offer ! 219 



materials for nest-building. I brought home a number 

 of these Weaver-finches to London after my visit to India 

 in 1885, when I went to fetch the great Hume Collection 

 from Simla. On my return journey I had to spend a few 

 days in Bombay, and in the company of a friend who 

 translated for me, I visited the shop of a bird-dealer, a nice 

 old fellow in a flowing white robe. He had a large assort- 

 ment of birds in his shop, including species from Australia 

 and the Moluccas, and I evidently impressed him by 

 telling the names of his birds and the countries they came 

 from. As I gradually made my selection, I heard the old 

 gentleman ask my friend who was this person who seemed 

 to know all about the birds ; and on learning that I came 

 from the great British Museum across the sea, he showed 

 me over his entire menagerie. I then, through the medium 

 of my friend, laid him a wager that I would underta]<e to 

 give him the name and the habitat of every bird in his 

 establishment, and that whenever he admitted that I was 

 correct, he was to give me a "Bengali" or a Mynah of 

 some sort, and that whenever I did not know the bird or 

 where it came from, I was to forfeit a rupee. I am sorry 

 to say that he declined the wager, and I had to pay — not 

 much however — for the crowd of Weaver-finches and other 

 birds I selected. They lived through the discomforts of 

 the sea-voyage in the monsoon of July, and nearl}' all 

 reached England in safety, but we found them rather 

 monotonous and uninteresting little birds, and ultimately 

 gave them away. 



A grass-nest of another kind is made by the Fan-tailed 

 Warbler {Cisticola cisticola), which is an inhabitant of 

 Southern Europe, Africa, and India. This little bird 

 selects a reed-bed for its breeding-place, and then proceeds 

 to tack together several of the reeds, so that in the cavity 

 produced by this engineering it is able to place its nest, 

 which is a deep and narrow purse of grass and reeds, lined 



