England.
Niton, Isle of Wight.
1909
Aug. 25 [August 25, 1909]
 We are staying here at the Royal Sandrock Hotel, the
prettiest little old inn I have yet seen in all England.
Behind it is a garden full of shrubbery and small trees,
before it is a lawn bordered by flower beds, beyond which one
looks out over the British Channel. In the garden are
Robins, Blackbirds, Wrens and Chaffinches. I wonder if any
garden in England is without all four species! The Robins
are still singing freely, the Wrens more sparingly but well.
Yesterday I saw a Golden-crested Kinglet. It looked
exactly like our bird and had the same way of moving
about in the foliage of an evergreen, nervously twitching its
wings, while its tzee-tzee-tzee call was identical with that
of our Regulus.
  I am getting to love the Robin redbreast as favourably as
if I had been born an Englishman (Kipling said to me 
the other day "no man or boy in all England would harm
a Robin but the trade mark does not seem always to
protect your American bird"). He is certainly a little dear,
so charmingly tame & confiding and with such a delightfully
sprightly song, doubly precious at this season when
almost all other singing birds have lapsed into silence.
He chiefly affects shrubbery & garden paths but occasionally
alights for a moment on open lawns. In his manner
of alighting to pick up an [?] and then almost
immediately flying up again into a tree or bush he reminds me
of our Bluebird but unlike the Bluebird he spends
much of his time concealed in dense shrubbery.
Robin Redbreast