MOOR-HENS IN HYDE PARK. 
The sparrow, like the poor, we have always with 
us, and on windy days even the large-sized rook 
is blown about the murkiness which does duty 
for sky over London ; and on such occasions its 
coarse, corvine dronings seem not unmusical, nor 
without something of a tonic effect on our jarred 
nerves. And here the ordinary Londoner has got 
to the end of his ornithological list — that is to say, 
his winter list. He knows nothing about those 
wind-worn waifs, the " occasional visitors " to the 
metropolis — the pilgrims to distant Meccas and 
Medinas that have fallen, overcome by weariness, 
at the wayside ; or have encountered storms in 
the great aerial sea, and lost compass and reckon- 
ing, and have been lured by false lights to perish 
miserably at the hands of their cruel enemies. It 
may be true that gulls are seen on the Serpentine, 
that woodcocks are flushed in Lincoln's Inn Fields, 
but the citizen, who goes to his office in the 
morning and returns after the lamps have been 
