How a Day was spent. 2^ 



exercise them, and pruning and trimming their feathers. To 

 put their love of cleanliness to the proof, a gentleman, a great 

 friend of all birds, had some sticky mud rubbed upon the backs 

 of two of the young ones whilst the parents were absent. On 

 their return, either by their own keen sense of propriety, or, 

 perhaps, the complaint of the young ones, they saw what had 

 happened, and were not only greatly disconcerted, but very 

 angry, and instantly set to work to clean the little unfortunates, 

 which, strange to say, they managed to do by making use of 

 dry earth, which they brought to the nest for that purpose. 

 Human intellect could not have suggested a better mode. 



This same gentleman determined to spend a whole day in dis- 

 covering how the thrushes spent it. Hiding himself, therefore, 

 in a little hut of fir boughs, he began his observations in the 

 early morning of the 8th of June. At half-past two o'clock, the 

 birds began to feed their brood, and in two hours had fed them 

 thirty- six times. It was now half-past five, the little birds were 

 all wide awake, and one of them, whilst pruning its feathers, lost 

 its balance and fell out of the nest to the ground. On this the 

 old ones set up the most doleful lamentations, and the gentleman, 

 coming out of his retreat, put the little one back into the nest. 

 This kind action, however, wholly disconcerted the parents, nor 

 did they again venture to feed their young till an artifice of the 

 gentleman led them to suppose that he was gone from their 

 neighbourhood. No other event happened to them through the 

 day, and by half-past nine o'clock at night, when all went to 

 rest, the young ones had been fed two hundred and six times. 



Thrushes, however, become occasionally so extremely tame 

 that the female will remain upon her eggs and feed her young. 



