182 BIRDS IN TOWN AND VILLAGE 



horse, and hears their shrill notes all day from 

 the wayside ! Yet how pleasant to listen to their 

 minstrelsy in the green summer foliage, where 

 they are not too abundant! We can have too 

 much of anything, however charming it may be 

 in itself. Those who live where scores of hum- 

 ming-birds are perpetually dancing about the 

 garden flowers find that the eye grows weary of 

 seeing the daintiest forms and brightest colours 

 and liveliest motions that birds exhibit. We are 

 told that Edward the Confessor grew so sick of 

 the incessant singing of nightingales in the forest 

 of Havering-at-Bower that he prayed to Heaven 

 to silence their music; whereupon the birds 

 promptly took their departure, and returned no 

 more to that, forest until after the king's death. 

 The sparrow' is not so sensitive as the legendary 

 nightingales, and is not to be got rid of in this easy 

 manner. He is amenable only to a rougher kind 

 of persuasion; and it would be impossible to devise 

 a more effectual method of lessening his predomi- 

 nance than that which Nature teaches — namely 

 to subject him to the competition of other 

 and better species. He is well equipped for 

 the struggle — hardy, pugnacious, numerous, and in 



