they sit within hearing distance, but they are perpetually mimicking each other. One may say that they are accomplished mimics but prefer mimicking their own to other species. But they only imitate the notes that take their fancy, so to speak. Thus, occasionally, one strikes out a phrase, a new expression, which appears to please him, and after a few moments he repeats it again, then again, and so on and on, and if you remain an hour within hearing he will perhaps be still repeating it at short intervals. Now, if by chance there is something in the new phrase which pleases the listeners too, you will note that they instantly suspend their own singing, and for some little time they do nothing but listen. By and by the new note or phrase will be exactly reproduced from a bird on another bush; and he, too, will begin repeating it at short intervals. Then a second one will get it, then a third, and eventually all the birds in that thicket will have it. The constant repeating of the new note may then go on for hours, and it may last longer. You may return to the spot on the second day and sit for an hour or longer, listening, and still hear that same note constantly repeated until you are sick and tired of it, or it may even get on your nerves. I remember that on one occasion I avoided a certain thicket, one of my favourite daily haunts for three whole days, not to hear that one everlasting sound; then I returned and to my great relief the birds were all at their old game of composing, and not one uttered--perhaps he didn't dare--the too hackneyed phrase. I was sharply reminded one day by an incident in the village of this old Patagonian experience, and of the strange human-like weakness or passion for something new and arresting in music or song, something "tuney" or "catchy." It chanced that when I left London a new popular song had come out and was "all the rage," a tune and words invented or first produced in the music-halls by a woman named Lottie Collins, with a chorus to it--_Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay_, repeated several times. First caught up in the music-halls it spread to the streets, and in ever-widening circles over all London, and over all the land. In London people were getting tired of hearing it, but when I arrived at my village "in a hole," and settled down among the Badgers, I heard it on every hand--in cottages, in the streets, in the fields, men, women and children were singing, whistling, and humming it, and in the evening at the inn roaring it out with as much zest as if they had been singing _Rule Britannia._