BT WAY OF APPENDIX. 
189 
more familiar port, " desolate and overgrown with 
grass/' in which I formerly moved with greater 
ease. Blown by adverse winds from my own 
coast and cast on shore here for the rest of my 
life, as I now begin to believe, I must either hold 
my peace or speak of what I see, and love best to 
see, with only this hope and ambition, that the 
admiration and other agreeable emotions which all 
bird life in all places excite in me may not prove 
wholly incommunicable. 
Some time back we heard a good deal about the 
hundred best books — too much, I fanc}^ ; for hear- 
ing so much on the subject one was tempted to 
ask how the magnificent intellectual prigs would 
have liked it if their patient admirers had revolted 
and shut them up for the rest of their lives, each 
one with his hundred chosen best books for only 
entertainment ? After all, it would have been no 
very great punishment, considering the offence ; 
not worse, nay, not nearly so severe, as that which 
we commonly inflict on our feathered captive, 
when, of the ten thousand or half a million 
differently-flavoured seeds, buds, and other morsels 
that Nature gave to its volatile creature, we select 
perhaps two — rape and canary seed, let us say — 
for its only sustenance. 
But it would not be so absurd in these days 
