ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. \ 
Nature Notes ; 
THE SELBORNE SOCIEVrS MHGHZINE. 
No. 207. MARCH, 1907. VoL. XVIII. 
EXPLICET QUI POSSIT. 
A Bird Phantasy. 
O they built their nest and lived happy ever after. 
That, I suppose, was the beginning of the story. 
But I must confess at once that I know nothing at all 
about the beginning. The end (that part of it which 
happened before my time) must have puzzled somebody ; for 
the couple of Blue Tits were not like ordinary fossilized, petrified 
objects. Turned and changed they certainly were outwardly — 
supposing them once upon a time to have been alive — but 
nothing of the life and go, the self-assertiveness natural to a Blue 
Tit was lacking in this petrified pair. Still, I repeat, I know 
nothing of the beginning of the story, and can only take it up 
where I found it, and that was in the sunny corner of an old 
curiosity shop in the Cathedral city of Winchester. 
Side by side on a brown shelf, the brilliant little birds sat, 
life-like in their attitudes as in their colourings. The small 
round heads were bent so low over some delicacy the tits were 
enjoying, that the little pert sectionised faces were hardly visible, 
and the bright blue caps were almost lost to view. Each bird 
was engrossed with a piece of cocoanut or hard fat — it was diffi- 
cult to say which — and the sharp straight little beaks had 
patterned the food all over with hundreds of pin point marks 
of machine-like regularity. In such top-heavy attitudes (if any- 
thing as light and gymnastic as a Blue Tit may be called top- 
heavy), the balancing blue tails, which stuck straight out at an 
acute angle from the closely folded wings, had a purpose expressed 
in every shaded feather. 
I, bird-lover and bird-friend, never doubted that the Blue Tits 
were alive when one morning towards the middle of iMarch I 
stepped down into the old gabled shop, and tip-toed swiftly 
towards them, too much astonished to bestow more than a hasty 
