"_Of various plume and chirp the shiv'ring birds_ _Alight on hedge or bush, where late concealed_ _Their nests now hang apparent to the view._" GRAHAME. To November we ought to give the woodcock, the aristocrat among our winter visitors. To see one in a winter's walk makes the walk memorable; we speak for ever so long afterwards of "the day we saw that woodcock." An old book says: "Of woodcocks especially, it is remarkable that upon a change of the wind to the east, about Allhallows-tide, they will seem to have come all in a night; for though the former day none are to be found, yet the next morning they will be in every bush." This was three hundred years ago, and woodcocks are not now to be found "in every bush," even though the wind (as it too often is) be east "about Allhallows-tide," although that "they seem to have come all in a night" is strictly true, as woodcocks migrate by night, and guns out one day in October that have not flushed a single cock, will the next day make a bag. At one time the bird was so common that weather forecasts were made from its habits, as in Grahame's "sure harbinger when they so early come, of early winter, tedious and severe," and Phillips' "the woodcocks early visit and abode, of long continuance in our temp'rate clime, foretell a lib'ral harvest." Earlier still, it was another name for a fool, and in Elizabethan authors this synonym for a stupid person occurs with other bird-nicknames with tedious frequency--gull, rook, cormorant--and they are to be collected by the score without difficulty from, say, Nash and Ben Jonson, showing how colloquial in Shakespeare's day was the general familiarity with birds and their supposed characteristics. When smoking was introduced into England, one of the first names for the pipe was "the woodcock's head," the stem being the beak. But why the bird should have become a synonym for a witless person is nowadays difficult to understand, for--except that it comes and goes as a rule on the same tracks to and from its feeding-grounds, and thus tells the trap-setter where to place his snares with deadliest effect--it is a singularly wary bird, and never taken off its guard. And so we come to December, "the king of the months," and its wren, "the king of the birds." Why king? Because it was once decided in a parliament of the birds, that the one [Illustration: THE OLD COCK PHEASANT]