26o ON SURREY HILLS. 



light and clear nights that he will do best. In dull 

 weather, too, I have known him leave his snug 

 covert to "fossick" about with that wonderful long 

 bill of his, well furnished as it is with sensitive 

 nerves, in the dead leaves of the scrub oaks. A 

 plump, dainty-looking, well-set-up creature he is, as 

 he trips here and there with head knowingly held on 

 one side, his bright, full, moist eye glistening. That 

 bit of velvety green turf beside the runnel shows him 

 off to great advantage — in fact he is no longer a brown 

 bird, the green shows him up as the beautiful creature 

 he truly is, as delicately marked as the wryneck. 



A wood-pigeon claps off from the branch of a fir- 

 tree near at hand : it is quite enough to startle our 

 friend, and he squats down as closely as ever a toad 

 — bee-snapping Gabriel, our rustics call him — squatted 

 when he heard the owner of the bee-hives coming 

 where he had been devouring the inmates wholesale. 

 And now he is on his way again, turning and sorting 

 the dead leaves from side to side, with an occasional 

 upward flirt of his tail that shows the white and black 

 markings, a movement that has proved fatal to num- 

 bers of his family in the olden times, when the falcon 

 was used for their capture. In a work on falconry 



