donis remittit ciconian Polonis." No person has yet put an iron collar on the moor-hen to receive gifts in return, or followed its feeble fluttering flight to discover the limits of its migration which is probably no further away than the Kentish marshes and other wet sheltered spots in the south of England; that it leaves the country when it quits the park is not to be believed. Still, it goes with the wave, and with the wave returns; and, like the migratory birds that observe times and seasons, it comes back to its own home--that circumscribed spot of earth and water which forms its little world, and is more to it than all other reedy and willow-shaded pools and streams in England. It is said to be shy in disposition, yet all may see it here, within a few feet of the Row, with so many people continually passing, and so many pausing to watch the pretty birds as they trip about their little plot of green turf, deftly picking minute insects from the grass and not disdaining crumbs thrown by the children. A dainty thing to look at is that smooth, olive-brown little moor-hen, going about with such freedom and ease in its small dominion, lifting its green legs deliberately, turning its yellow beak and shield this way and that, and displaying the snow-white undertail at every step, as it moves with that quaint, graceful, jetting gait peculiar to the gallinules. Such a fact as this--and numberless facts just as significant all pointing to the same conclusion, might be adduced--shows at once how utterly erroneous is that often-quoted dictum of Darwin's that birds possess an instinctive or inherited fear of man. These moor-hens fear him not at all; simply because in Hyde Park they are not shot at, and robbed of their eggs or young, nor in any way molested by him. They fear no living thing, except the irrepressible small dog that occasionally bursts into the enclosure, and hunts them with furious barkings to their reedy little refuge. And as with these moor-hens, so it is with all wild birds; they fear and fly from, and suspiciously watch from a safe distance, whatever molests them, and wherever man suspends his hostility towards them they quickly outgrow the suspicion which experience has taught them, or which is traditional among them; for the young and inexperienced imitate the action of the adults they associate with, and learn the suspicious habit from them.