] 8 The Minstrels of the Summer. 



had become more and more thickened, according to the rela- 

 tive increase of age. These being the facts of the case, I have 

 no hesitation, for my own part, in asserting that every adult 

 male giraffe is certainly possessed of three distinct horns, or, 

 to speak in the more precise zoological phraseology which I 

 have elsewhere adopted, this ruminating herbivore possesses 

 three cranial ' ' pseudo-ceratophorous epiphyses permanently 

 invested by a hairy integument." 



THE MINSTRELS OF THE SUMMEE. 



BY SHIRLEY HIBBERD. 



It is one of the consolations of having to live within the hear- 

 ing of the tolling of the hour by the clock of St. Paul's that all 

 the summer minstrels are to be heard in the garden. Though 

 only three miles distant, as the crow flies, from the General Post 

 Office, Stoke Newington is annually .visited by the nightingale, 

 cuckoo^ flycatcher, blackcap, garden warbler, whitethroat^ 

 grasshopper warbler, redstart, and some few other nomadic 

 minstrels of less fame. Every spring it occurs to me that it 

 would be an interesting contribution to natural history if we 

 could have lists of all the birds visiting and nesting in the im- 

 mediate vicinity of our great towns and cities, and as the 

 plants peculiar to numerous suburban districts have been care- 

 fully registered, we might hope some day for similar catalogues 

 of birds classified as to their localities, with especial reference 

 to the nearness of their haunts to populous places. In the 

 pages of Rustic Adornments, I called the attention of Lon- 

 doners to the fact that at Stoke Newington the nightingale was 

 always to be heard in its season, and in consequence of that 

 intimation there have been numerous parties formed to visit the 

 reservoirs in Lordship Road, where, in the secluded shrubberies, 

 this and other warblers breed in perfect security. Though 

 during the period of twenty years' experience in connection 

 with the nightingale in this locality, buildings have increased 

 to an extent which would be saddening were it not true that 

 men are better than trees, the nightingales have not only not 

 left it, but this year they literally abound, and since the 22nd 

 of April I have commonly heard three and four at a time 

 singing in rivalry among the trees surrounding my own garden. 

 So with the cuckoo, its merry, inspiriting note may be heard 

 resounding from every point of the compass, and wrens and 

 blackcaps are almost as numerous as sparrows. This, I 

 imagine, is to be attributed in some measure to our increasing 



