BIRD-HAUNTED LONDON 125 



hooliganism, but maybe they are tinged with the 

 associations of the place. The remarkable thing about 

 my sparrows is their capacity to learn, the cause above 

 all others of their prosperity. Conceited, aggressive 

 people learn nothing ; knowledge comes from patient 

 experiment, humility, watchfulness and readiness to 

 seize the occasion when it offers. My sparrows are 

 not Pelmanites or profiteers, though this taking advan- 

 tage of the labour of others is Jew-like. But the bad Jew 

 (who is generally behind the luxury trades — brothels, 

 fashion, cinemas, etc.) preys upon the vices and frivolities 

 of men ; the sparrow lives on the specializations of 

 others and does the work, which is quite unlike the para- 

 sitic money-getting of, say, the fur-trader. Not only 

 do they keep in the background, alert, judicious, 

 capable and unobtrusive, but I have never known 

 them to take the initiative in anything. They wait 

 and watch what others do, and then if it seems good 

 to them, and being quite catholic in taste and without 

 prejudice, they go and do likewise. Thus it was the 

 blue-tit, robin and starling who showed them the way 

 to feed from the bird-table — sometimes, as I have 

 seen, driving their pupils off it ; blue-tit and oxeye 

 to perch upon the portholes of my hanging box, 

 thrust in their heads and extract the oatmeal from 

 within ; the thrush who instructed them in the joys 

 of the same food on the ground ; and blue-tit and 

 oxeye, again, how to grasp the rind of a cocoanut 

 with their feet and hammer down (as now they do 

 regularly) upon the succulence within. They are the 

 least professional and specialized and the most elastic- 

 minded of the whole passerine order, and their 

 ability to profit by the specializations of others is un- 

 measured. All these experiments are conducted in un- 

 businesslike, shoddy, hoydenish fashion, for the sparrow, 

 being a jack-of-all-trades, possesses no technique to 

 any of them. He is the casual labourer of the 

 race of birds, and it is to his capacity for doing 

 any mortal thing in a second-rate way, to his 

 acutely intelligent observation of the habits of others 

 and decisiveness in acting upon what he has assimi- 



