48 
NATURE NOTES. 
their fluttering hearts to beat less and less wildly in response to 
aflfection. Success in taming wild creatures arises, I believe, 
not so much from inborn gift as from a carefully cultivated habit 
of extreme gentleness and quietude. Almost every living thing 
will yield its affection to those who supply it with suitable food 
and treat it with unvarying kindness. 
Desiring to secure for 3^oung people a portion of the deep 
happiness which I had gained by obtaining the confidence and 
love of bird and beast, I began to jot down notes of my own 
experience, with no higher literary ambition than to be perfectly 
truthful in my narration. One after another desired to hear 
what I had seen and known ; many of my friends became anxious 
to emulate my little victories and essay my methods. Thus, by 
degrees the sheaf of my small chapters, the humble annals of my 
pets, attained the limits of a volume, and I was persuaded to 
make my first venture in authorship. I have already said in 
the preface to a later work, and I can only repeat here, that no 
one in the world of letters can have been more surprised than 
I was at the response which my modest appeal received. But I 
have no illusions of vanity. I know that if my books have met 
with thousands of readers it depends upon no merit of style or 
form in my simple writing, but is a consequence of a sincere 
appeal to that innate love of the animal world — too often, alas ! 
obscured by ignorance — which exists in almost every human 
being. My chronicles of the life of birds and beasts have had 
but one feature to recommend them, their absolute fidelity to 
fact as it has come under my own observation. 
Thus I came to write my first book ; and if I am to say 
where I wrote it, then, in a large rambling house, quite close to 
London, but buried in gardens and woods that themselves are 
surrounded by a wild and sequestered common. Under a tulip- 
tree upon my lawn, in the flowery meadows that descend to my 
little lilied lake, within a secret sanctum that the branches of 
my old fir-trees darken, under the yew-tree where my nuthatches 
flit and my squirrels chatter, in a home of deep peace, though 
its blue sky southwards is sometimes brownish with the nearness 
to London, these pages were written and tremulously sent forth 
to a world of unknown friends. 
Eliza Brightwen. 
Peafowls (p. 17). —All peafowls are “black shouldered.” The cocks are 
particularly rich in colour, and the shoulder a black-blue ; the hens are a faint 
grey, almost white, with brown necks. There is an account, I believe, of them 
in the Monograph of the Phasianidce, by D. G. Elliot, which I have not by 
me. They have been supposed to be a separate species — from the extreme differ- 
ence of the sexes — but appear in most unaccountable manner, as if only “ sports.” 
I believe my late father was the first to draw attention to them some fifty years 
ago, since which we have always kept them. They are rare, owing, I fancy, to 
people not liking the hens, which, however, seem to us to be elegant, as well as a 
most curious freak of nature. 
Northrepps. 
Richard Gurney. 
