BIRDS AT THEIR BEST 31 



impressions of nature for long years or to the 

 end of life in all their original freshness. 



Some five or six years ago I heard a speech 

 about birds deUvered by Sir Edward Grey, in 

 which he said that the love and appreciation and 

 study of birds was something fresher and brighter 

 than the second-hand interests and conventional 

 amusements in which so many in this day try to 

 live ; that the pleasure of seeing and listening to 

 them was purer and more lasting than any 

 pleasures of excitement, and, in the long-run, 

 "happier than personal success." That was a 

 saying to stick in the mind, and it is probable that 

 some who listened failed to understand. Let us 

 imagine that in addition to this miraculous faculty 

 of the brain of storing innumerable brilliant images 

 of things seen and heard, to be reproduced at call 

 to the inner sense, there existed in a few gifted 

 persons a correlated faculty by means of which 

 these treasured images could be thrown at will 

 into the mind of another ; let us further imagine 

 that some one in the audience who had wondered 

 at that saying, finding it both dark and hard, had 

 asked me to explain it ; and that in response I 

 had shown him as by a swift succession of 



