150 
Birds and Flowers. 
claws, and attach themselves very closely to their 
special owners. 
They generally can be trained to go home con- 
tentedly to their own cage to roost, and they do 
not often wander far from home. 
Their great delight, next to mischief or thievery, 
is in bathing. A large pan, like a dog's basin, should 
always be provided for them, and there they will 
make a sputtering. Starlings build frequently in 
chimneys, and hollow trees, and under the roofs of 
houses and in old church steeples. Jackdaws do 
much the same, and they also frequent high rocks. 
Many a scrape have young gentlemen got into 
after their nests. In one edition of Beckstein there 
is about the worst instance I know of such harum- 
scarumness. There is at Dundee an old tower whose 
battlements rise about one hundred and fifty feet 
from the pavement at its foot ; and when Murray, 
“ the Dundee barber,” was a boy, a pair of Jackdaws 
built in a hole in this said tower. 
Determined to have the nest, what should young 
Murray do, but he crept out through the parapet, 
and a friend holding one side of a Scotch bonnet, 
he hung by the other, while with his disengaged 
hand he placed the eggs and young ones safely in 
the cap ! While thus engaged he kept carefully 
