Talking with the rector of the neighbouring parish of Phillack one day on this subject, he said, "Don't imagine that the daws restrict themselves to the chimneys where fires are not lighted. At all events it isn't so at Phillack. Perhaps we have too many daws in our village, but every year before lighting fires in the drawing and dining-rooms we have to call in a man with a pole to clear the flues out." He told me that a few years ago, one cold June day, a fire was lighted in the drawing-room, and as the smoke all poured out into the room a man was sent up to the roof with a pole to clear the obstruction out. Presently a mess of sticks came down and with them two fully-fledged young jackdaws, one dead, killed with the pole, the other sound and lively. This one they kept and it soon became quite tame; when able to fly it would go off and associate with the wild birds, but refused to leave the house until the following summer, when it found a mate and went away. The head keeper at Trevelloe, a remarkably vigorous and intelligent octogenarian who has been in his place over half a century, gave me some interesting information about the daws. He says they have greatly increased in recent years in this part of Cornwall because they are no longer molested; no person, he says, not even a game-keeper anxious about his pheasants, would think of shooting a jackdaw. But this is not because the bird has changed its habits. He is as great a pest as ever he was, and as an example of how bad jackdaws can be, he related the following incident told him by a friend of his, a head keeper on an estate adjoining a shooting his master took one year on the northwest coast of England. It happened that a big colony of daws existed within a mile or two of the preserves, and one day the keeper was called' away in a hurry and left the coops unattended for the best part of a day; it was the biggest mistake he had ever made and the chief disaster of his life. On his return he found that the daws had been before him and that all his precious chicks had been carried off. For several hours of that day there was a steady coming and going of birds between the cliffs and the coops, every daw going back with a chick in his beak for his hungry young in the nest. Yet my informant, this ancient and singularly intelligent old man, a gamekeeper all his life, who knows his jackdaw, could not tell me why gamekeepers no longer persecute so injurious a bird I He will not allow a sparrow-hawk to exist in his woods, yet all he could say when I repeated my question was, "No keeper ever thinks of hurting a jack now, but I can't say why."