76 
SPARROW. 
bird; and for four successive years, with a brief interval, all 
her progeny, which must at the expiration of that period, 
have amounted, at the rate of two or three broods a year, 
and five or six young to a brood, to some fifty or sixty at 
least, were ‘brought out’ under the matronage of their mother, 
to the morning and evening entertainments which Patrick 
Corbett gave. Doubtless they returned the compliment in 
the way of ‘concerts of ancient music,’ for even the chirp of 
a Sparrow must be music to the dweller in a London street. 
The interval above alluded to was a space of some two or 
three months, during which time our female friend shunned 
the society of the keeper of the itinerant coffee-shop, who 
had, most unintentionally, wounded her maternal feelings. An 
individual Sparrow of one of her broods finding it at its first 
essay in the air, not so easy a thing to fly up as to fly 
down, was removed by Patrick, out of pure kindness, to his 
own house for the day, where it was treated with the greatest 
care and affection. Nevertheless it died, and the mother 
shewed her sense of the wrong of the supposed child-stealing, 
by abstaining for the period mentioned from the society of 
her patron and friend; but in process of time a new family 
arrived, and for their sakes she overgot the injury, made up 
the quarrel, which, as it takes two parties to make, and in 
this case there was only one, it was no difficult matter to 
do, and all went on, and for aught I know, may still go 
on, at the corner of Tavistock Square, as harmoniously and 
pleasantly as before: ‘adsit omen.’ 
The following pleasing instance of both instinct and affection 
on behalf of another individual of our present species is from 
the pen of Mr. William H. Cordeaux, in the ‘Zoologist,’ page 
2798:—‘Living in the city portion of the great metropolis of 
London, I observed, one afternoon, in the aperture generally 
left for the cellar, or kitchen window, when underground, an 
unfledged House Sparrow, incapacitated from flying to any 
distance, which had been inadvertently precipitated down this 
same dungeon, across which, in an oblique direction, was laid 
an iron bar, extending within a foot of the surface; the j 
mother was at the top, looking down with pity and alarm 
at the awkward position of this, perhaps, her only child; 
many and ingenious were the attempts on the part both of 
parent and offspring for the regaining of the latter’s lost 
position; each and all proved futile and unavailing. I looked 
on with a degree of pleasurable excitement, mixed with fear 
