annually from Africa to breed, but is not permitted to breed, and many other equally beautiful and interesting species? MOOR-HENS IN HYDE PARK The sparrow, like the poor, we have always with us, and on windy days even the large-sized rook is blown about the murkiness which does duty for sky over London; and on such occasions its coarse, corvine dronings seem not unmusical, nor without something of a tonic effect on our jarred nerves. And here the ordinary Londoner has got to the end of his ornithological list--that is to say, his winter list. He knows nothing about those wind-worn waifs, the "occasional visitors" to the metropolis--the pilgrims to distant Meccas and Medinas that have fallen, overcome by weariness, at the wayside; or have encountered storms in the great aerial sea, and lost compass and reckoning, and have been lured by false lights to perish miserably at the hands of their cruel enemies. It may be true that gulls are seen on the Serpentine, that woodcocks are flushed in Lincoln's Inn Fields, but the citizen who goes to his office in the morning and returns after the lamps have been lighted, does not see them, and they are nothing in his life. Those who concern themselves to chronicle such incidents might just as well, for all that it matters to him, mistake their species, like that bird-loving but unornithological correspondent of the Times who wrote that he had seen a flock of golden orioles in Kensington Gardens. It turned out that what he had seen were wheatears, or they might draw a little on their imaginations, and tell of sunward-sailing cranes encamped on the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, flamingoes in the Round Pond, great snowy owls in Westminster Abbey, and an ibis--scarlet, glossy, or sacred, according to fancy--perched on Peabody's statue, at the Royal Exchange.