And yet somehow or another the nests, in spite of ruinous altercations, manage to get finished, and as soon as eggs are laid, the republic is as orderly as could be expected. But even then, no nest is left undefended. In due course the young rooks are hatched, and the truly terrible task of feeding five mouths is imposed upon the parents. But by constant industry they fulfil their duties, and by the end of April, or early in May, the nestlings scramble off their nests on to the boughs, and by feeble flutterings from point to point, keeping close to their nest all the time, practise and strengthen their wings. Their first flight to the ground is a sight to watch, for the youngsters are very nervous, and the old bird's patience is sometimes so sorely tried that, having coaxed them to fly in vain, she pushes them off the branch at last. Once on the ground they soon learn what to eat, and how to find it; but the instinct to go to the parents for food is so absurdly persistent, that you may often see a rook that looks as big as its mother, hurriedly gobbling up its own worm, in order to go and ask its mother for hers. And the gravity with which the old bird swallows the worm herself, and then turns to the overgrown young one, with a "Don't you wish you may get it, my dear?" is delightful. So tenacious are these birds of their old haunts that they are still to be found building in the central postal district of London, although the steady growth of the city makes the distances they have to fly for food longer and longer every year, while the perils they have to encounter on the way, telegraph and telephone wires, are annually accumulating. But there they are, in spite of growing London, and are the very first to bring the news to the city that spring is coming in the country. "_From the neighbouring vale_ _The Cuckoo, straggling up the hill-tops_ _Shouteth faint tidings of some gladder place._" WORDSWORTH. Long after the rook, the thrush, and blackbird have told us of the change of season, "the vernal cuckoo" comes shouting "the same song to sing." There is no parable in Nature so hard to interpret as this bird which the ancients, themselves puzzled, placed on the sceptre of Juno and the shoulder of Venus. The poet who hesitated to call it a bird-- "Shall I call thee bird, Or but a wandering voice? No bird, but an invisible thing, A voice, a mystery,"-- was not in doubt without reason. For it is, indeed, a mystery. Without a single "domestic" instinct, dividing its affections among all the mates it meets, making no nest, caring for no young, leaving the country as it came, without kith and kin, it is a bird to wonder at and to puzzle over. How comes it that it lays so small an egg, and so coloured that it can leave it in little birds' nests without exciting their suspicion? and what law in Nature makes the small foster-parents so idolise [Illustration: "_In some brake of fern and bramble_"]