I have often wondered that migration is not more often looked at through the other end of the telescope, and Great Britain called the "home," for instance, of the nightingale. What makes "home" for a bird? Is it not the place where the nest is built and the young are reared? For the rest of the year the families travel "abroad," returning "home" for all that makes life important and domestic. Their fixed addresses are in England, their names are in British directories as residing there. But their doctors will not let them winter "at home," and so they have to go on to the Continent, or to even warmer latitudes, for the colder months of the year. I myself entertain, and often express, a grudge against the "migrants" for staying only so long as it is fine; but as often as I do so, my conscience reproaches me, for, after all, the nightingale shows its affection for its birthplace by coming back to it; and, "in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations," remains a true-born English bird. What more could it do? It might certainly stay and freeze to death. But why should we expect nightingales to do more than we expect men and women to do? Which of us, if warned by doctors against the English winter and possessing the means to go abroad, would stop at home to die here, just to show that we are lovers of our country? So it would be quite in keeping with the sympathetic and kindly tendency of contemporary natural history, if we looked upon the birds when they come, as our own birds coming home, and when they go, as going abroad under the inexorable compulsion of health; if we welcomed them in Spring as returning fellow-countrymen, and bade them god-speed in Autumn, as delicate folk who would, if they could, but dare not, stop in Britain all the year round. And who can blame the birds, apart from necessities of life and death, for leaving our shores? Think of the climate they can always, by a morning's flight, enjoy, year in and year out, "in foreign countries"; what range of space, what perennial abundance of food, and then calculate the force of inherited affection for the place of their birth that urges them, hosts of little feeble people, to dare the appalling journey "home," to risk the truly awful perils of return to their native land. Had they human intelligence, and did they live by reason, not one of them would think of coming here.