THE SPARROW. 
107 
repeated quarrels. It is not fair, however, to charge 
him with indiscriminate destruction; there are few 
garden plants for which he has any regard, and the vast 
havoc he makes in the insect broods amply compensates 
for the stealing of a little green meat for his young 
ones. 
Bat the sparrow has his enemies. He lives no life of 
uninterrupted enjoyment. His acts of petty larceny 
bring upon him the vengeance of the farmer, who sets a 
price upon his head, and thereby encourages vagrancy 
and destructiveness in all the ragged urchins of a village. 
Arsenic, nux vomica , and baited traps, are offered him, 
and he takes his choice and dies forthwith, to haunt the 
fields afterwards in a ghostly shape, and revenge himself 
by watching the growth and multiplication of cater¬ 
pillars—caterpillars which he, if living, would have 
destroyed, but which, left to fatten on the farmer's crops, 
entail upon him ten times the cost of a sparrow. Then 
there is the screech owl, who now and then finds her 
way to the nest when both parents are out, and gobbles 
up the callow brood, and, if she could, would do a 
similar office for the parents. But the windhover hawk 
is his most deadly enemy. He dreads the high-fiying 
mouser, and has no appetite for growing corn when she 
is within sight. It is seldom that he suffers in a positive 
way, for the windhover is mostly content with a few 
mice and cockchafers, but the dread is instinctive; he 
knows the hawk-like swoop, and he cowers under cover 
without making the necessary distinctions. As to scare¬ 
crows, he snaps his bill at such in perfect contempt. 
He views them as demonstrations of eccentricity,— 
