224 
NATURE NOTES. 
transmitted his liking for egg-flip to his children : but he has 
never condescended, so far as I can learn, to the meanness of 
hypocrisy, and if he goes into a cornfield to seek for slugs and 
cockchafer grubs and wireworms, he does not abuse the trust 
reposed in him, and steal the corn. 
But all this is beside the point ; one has to urge that an Act 
for the preservation of Great Britain’s friends — the birds — has 
been passed ; and that if the beauty and the joy and the use 
of bird life perish from our midst, the County Councils will 
have in future to bear the blame. 
H. D. Rawnsley. 
A BIRD-LOVED SUBURB. 
[Conchided from page 205.) 
HE nightingales, on their arrival, are most likely to be 
first heard at the western edge of Sidmouth Wood, 
in which nightingales are often so plentiful that the 
wood might well be called nightingale-grove. Here I 
have often heard nightingales singing very beautifully in the 
daytime, sometimes in emulative contest. One showery morn- 
ing, when warm rain was falling, I stood for a while sheltered 
from a sharp shower, under a tree; whereupon, almost close to 
my ear there burst forth a glorious song from a nightingale. 
By-and-by there broke out a fainter song from a more distant 
bird; and the two went on singing in seeming rivalry, gradually 
drawing nearer and nearer to each other, till, at last, one of 
the two nightingales flew out close to 1113^ head. In the prettily 
named Nightingale Lane, which leads down the hill to Buc- 
cleuch House, I have never heard the song of the nightingale, 
but it is often to be heard by da}' in the thickets — lately 
threatened by the Philistines with destruction — a little nearer 
to Petersham. Therefrom it may often be heard, pealing glori- 
ously right across the Petersham meadows. 
In the lower estuary of the river, I have seen much of the 
Thames life of nightingales, and become quite familiar with their 
habits. There they come over in large numbers at their earliest 
arrival ; there I have found their nests, and seen their pretty 
eggs, of uniform and continuous olive tinged colour. Much like 
the robin, in perching and feeding, is the nightingale ; much like 
the robinets are the young nightingales, in the plain speckle of 
their first plumage. The place in Sidmouth Wood where the 
nightingale is most likely to be seen is the transverse glade, upon 
the grass of which glade it may be now and then seen to hop, 
robin-like, to pick up a small worm. There, perhaps, some 
may have seen the bird without knowing what it was. 
