366 
British Birds. 
and this time I left him in peace for he seemed so happy on 
his little patch of gorse and bog, which he evidently regarded 
as his very own, that I had not the heart to set the trap. 
1 should like to be able to tell you that he brought up a 
family successfully but, alas, misfortunes never come singly; 
when I next looked up my friend I found liim perched on 
a block of Dartmoor granite, disconsolately surveying the 
charred remains of his favourite gorse covert and the still 
smoking peat: they had been " swaling " the moor and had 
burnt him out. I never saw him again. 
In due course, I obtained an adult male in fine condition 
from one of our members for a few shillings and turned the 
three out in a division of the larger aviary, where I have 
planted reeds and bulrushes. Here the male used to perch on 
the broken stem of a rush and bow to his ladies, displaying 
his cinnamon- waistcoat, and say " Chat, chat: look at me— 
what a fine fellow I am." However, I never saw any 
signs of pairing or nesting and had quite come to the conchision 
that my experiment was going to be a failure when, one 
morning in early June, something caught my eye in the 
Stonechats' division. There was a mound in one corner 
covered with a kind of long fine grass which grows on the 
moor and, in the grass on the side of the mound, I noticed 
a small round hole — a sort of little tunnel leading 'into the 
interior of the mound, which 1 should have thought to 'he a 
mouse-run, had I not known that there were no mice in 
that aviary. I kept my eye on it and a few days later I 
saw a little brown object creeping cautiously out of the tun- 
nel. It was not a mouse: it was one of the hen Stonechats. 
A few days later I turned a strong ray of light into the little 
tunnel by the aid of a pocket-mirror and I saw an exquisite 
little nest, the cup as round as if it had been turned by a 
lathe, containing five bluish eggs some of which were unspotted 
and some clouded with reddish -brown on the upper end. 
But, long before the eggs were due to hatch, came the 
usual and, I think I may say, the inevitable disaster, for this 
season has been the unluckiest I have ever had and, though 
my philosophy has not railed me, I must admit that I shall 
not be r.orry to see the back of 1910. One morning I found 
the hen, which should have been sitting, perched on a stump 
