140 With the Nightingales at the Vicarage. 



admire the art shown in so disposing the trees that the 

 limits of the little park on the other side seem to be 

 indefinite and distant. 



This park abounds with birds, for the vicar is a great 

 bird lover as well as tree lover, and has even been 

 heard to say, when practical-minded persons have told 

 him of the fruit the birds would eat or destroy, that he 

 would rather be without the fruit (as that can be 

 bought), than lose the music of the birds, which make 

 him delightful concert the livelong day, and have even 

 relieved and sweetened to him weary hours of night. 



It would seem as though the birds knew it, for they 

 build in the most exposed places here, where one can 

 stand and look on the callow young ones in the nest, 

 raising and opening little beaks as you " tweet, tweet " 

 to them and put the finger near, or into the deep, dark, 

 liquid eyes of the mother-bird, as she sits brooding 

 over eggs or young ones. 



Indeed, the vicar has heard of the practice pursued 

 in some parts of America, and pursued too by the 

 famous Waterton, and in order to attract into his pre- 

 serves some of the rarer birds, has erected in secluded 

 corners of his grounds box-nests like that represented 

 in the engraving, and has in this wonderfully succeeded. 



On one occasion a boy had intruded, found out, and 

 carried off one of the nests from a tree in the hedge. 

 The vicar's daughter, passing that way, saw the mother- 

 bird sitting disconsolately on the tree from which the 

 nest had gone. The culprit was speedily found (for 

 all things are soon known here, and nothing can long 

 be hid), followed, and compelled to bring back the nest 

 with its little family, and put it exactly where it was 

 before in the branch ; and the disconsolate mother was 

 comforted, and reared that brood there to maturity. 



