8 
NATURE NOTES 
prisoned, as I am, among the bricks and mortar, but can at 
pleasure watch Nature and her ways, would do yeoman’s 
service by collecting as many like instances as they can in 
the light of my suggestion. At present that view is not ad- 
mitted by scientists. All the same, I believe we should thus 
“ pick up another pebble on the sea-shore” by no means without 
value. 
Herbert Snow. 
THE GARDEN OF MY YOUTH. 
HAVE pleasant memories of that old-time garden of 
my youth : it was surrounded by a well-built brick 
wall, in place of the jerry-built apologies which are 
nowadays springing up like mushrooms in August 
after a sharp shower of rain. Was it not in this very garden 
that I — now a fully fledged member of the British Ornithologists’ 
Union — first made my acquaintance with our feathered friends ? 
Surely, if memory serves me correctly, it was here that I first 
took an intelligent interest in the speckled-breasted thrush and 
the golden-daggered blackbird. Here it was — in the garden of 
my youth — that I first became acquainted with the little blue 
tit which had become entangled in the nets placed over the 
raspberries and currants to protect them from the fruit-loving 
birds, but not the tits, for they, above all others, are of great 
service to the fruit grower in the destruction of hurtful insects 
and their larvae. In those days, I remember, we released the 
little feathered jewels, for grandpere was a careful and zealous 
student of natural history, and the birds were as much to him 
as they were to dear old Gilbert White, of Selborne, or as circum- 
venting the wily trout was to our brother of the angle — Izaak 
Walton. 
How well I remember, as if it was only yesterday, setting 
that brick trap to catch the sparrows, and how, more often than 
not, the robin was found inside as I nervously uplifted the fallen 
brick, and how my conscience pricked me until he of the red 
breast was at once given his liberty. 
It was not my intention, I can assure you, to catch a robin: 
I had too much faith in the superstitions and beliefs about the 
bird — so far as they were supposed to concern my own personal 
safety— to wish to trap them. Somehow, however, that trap — 
made with four bricks, a peg purloined from the wash-basket 
and a catapult-shaped stick from off a neighbouring currant- 
bush — seemed destined to fall either without a catch (although 
the bait in this case was always gone), or with a lustrous-eyed 
robin crouched in the corner ready to make a bold dash for 
liberty at the uplifting of the brick. 
Sparrows, however, did occasionally fall a prey to my cun- 
