A BIRD-HAUNTED PINE GROVE. 
H3 
ground, and coo their loudest, and fly up in encounter, and coo 
again, and go on to fight again for any length of time, and seem 
to enjoy the duel. Of this Haydn probably knew nothing when 
he wrote so sweetly about these doves in his Creation. 
Sometimes we may come on a pond or a stream where the 
birds take their morning bath ; and it is a very interesting sight 
to watch them at their bathing unobserved. Once, when I was 
enjoying such a scene, I was puzzled by a pretty yellow and 
dark bird among the bathers, which I took at first to be a yellow 
wagtail. As I watched, this bird began to fly along the still 
water, and to dip in, and to fly along, dipping again and 
again ; so that I thought the pretty bird was bathing and 
dipping even more freely than I had ever seen a wagtail or a 
swallow ; but by and by I saw it resting like a beautiful leaf 
upon the water, and then I saw that it was dead, that it had 
been drowned in bathing. With some difficulty I got the bird 
ashore, and then I found that it was a very pretty goldfinch- 
canary mule, which had, no doubt, got away from much petting 
in some cage. Immediately below the pines, the birds are 
mostly content, like pious Moslems, to enjoy a bath of dust or 
sand, which some of them seem to like better even than water. 
Outside the heaths and pine-groves we come on the breeding- 
places, or the resorts, of multitudes of sea-birds. Around the 
end sacred to the bishop and the canonized king, there are 
grand and mighty cliffs, wrought out below by the waves into 
caves and arches famous to geologists, who name from the 
neighbourhood some of their formations ; and these cliffs, here 
and there upheaved in twisted and contorted strata, are, in the 
breeding season, tenanted by vociferous flocks of gulls and 
guillemots and cormorants, and other sea-birds. Here no one 
can get at them, from above or below; and here, accordingly, 
they breed, and have bred for ages, undisturbed. As we walk 
along, on the pine-grove side, it is very pleasant, in the quiet of 
early morning, to look down on small flocks of guillemots fishing 
along the bay ; or to watch the flight of a cormorant as it wings 
its way for miles close to the sea, from one fishing-ground to 
another. And the sea-gulls, at such hard times as they come to 
feed up the Thames, or in the lake of St. James’s Park, will 
come in to be fed at a window, while tits and other winter 
residents are supplied by a bird-feeding handmaiden under the 
trees below. 
The estuaries into which pour the salmon-loved rivers, are 
visited every winter by flocks of sea-fowl that stream south- 
wards from the summer homes of such sea-birds in Norway. 
In a severe winter, one of these estuaries may, perhaps, be 
frozen over, and thus afford sporting ground somewhat unusual 
on our coasts. And all of them afford sport of another kind to 
those who love to stalk, and to follow, and to shoot these 
visitors. By such sportsmen, the wary habits of the brent- 
geese are carefully studied ; and all the other devices are adopted 
