No act of the robin's more forcibly illustrates its trust in man than the manner in which, at a season when all animals are abnormally shy and suspicious, it makes its nest not only near our dwellings, but actually in many cases under the same roof as ourselves. Letterboxes, flowerpots, old boots, and bookshelves have all done duty, and I even remember a pair of robins, many years ago in Kent, bringing up two broods in an old rat trap which, fortunately too rusty to act, was still set and baited with a withered piece of bacon. Pages might be filled with the mere enumeration of curious and eccentric nesting sites chosen by this fearless bird, but a single proof of its indifference to the presence of man during the time of incubation may be cited from the MS. notebooks of the second Earl of Malmesbury, which I have read in the library at Heron Court. It seems that, while the east wing of that pleasant mansion was being built, a pair of robins, having successfully brought up one family in one of the unfinished rooms, actually reared a second brood in a hole made for a scaffold-pole, though the sitting bird, being immediately beneath a plank on which the plasterers stood at work, was repeatedly splashed with mortar! The egg of the robin is subject to considerable variety of type. I think it was the late Lord Lilford who, speaking on the subject of a Bill for the protection of wild birds' eggs, then before the House of Lords, gave it as his belief that no ornithologist of repute would swear to the name of a single British bird's egg without positively seeing one or other of the parent birds fly off the nest. This was, perhaps, a little overstating the difficulty of evidence, since any schoolboy with a fancy for birds-nesting might without hesitation identify such pronounced types as those of the chaffinch, with its purple blotches, the song-thrush with its black spots on a blue ground, or the nightingale, which resembles a miniature olive. Eggs, on the other hand, like those of the house sparrow, redshank and some of the smaller warblers, are so easily confused with those of allied species that Lord Lilford's caution is by no means superfluous. Ordinarily speaking, the robin's egg is white, with red spots at one end, but I remember taking at Bexley, nearly thirty years ago, an immaculate one of coffee colour. As the robin is a favourite foster-parent with cuckoos, my first thought was that this might be an unusually small egg of the parasitic bird, which was very plentiful thereabouts. It so happened, however, that three days after I had abstracted the first and only egg I took from that nest, there was a second of the same type; and, much as I would have liked this also for my collection, I left it in the nest so as to set all doubts at rest. My moderation was rewarded, for no one else found the nest, and in due course the coffee-coloured egg produced a robin like the rest.