In London there is always enough food for the small creatures, and even in the hardest winter, when blackbirds and thrushes and all kinds of other birds, unsuspected residents many of them, are picked up dead in the parks and gardens, the sparrow is not pinched. So that in the popularity of the sparrow there is no tenderness involved. Londoners like him because he is one of themselves, because he is plucky and self-reliant, taking things much as they come; because he stands upon his rights, or what he has come to call his rights; is robust, and never "down at the mouth." He is a dirty little ragamuffin, but not in the least ashamed of himself, for he takes his small smoky dusty person into the presence of Royalty with as much assurance as into a mews, and chirps as complacently all through service in Westminster Abbey as in a rain-spout in Shoreditch. The metropolitan cat seldom arrives at a sparrow, just as the small gamins of the streets never get run over by cabs. Their whole lives are spent in evasion, and they develop an extraordinary agility in escaping from accidents. I find it very hard to defend the familiar little fowl and almost as hard to accuse him. That he behaves with levity in places of public worship, that he is disrespectful to bye-laws and perpetually trespassing, is true enough; but how can you bring such misdemeanours home to a bird who hops up a water-pipe in reply to your charges? In private life, too, he is disreputable. As a frivolous parent given to rolling the eggs out of the nest, and even also his infant progeny; as an unworthy spouse, transferring his affections lightly, and often assaulting the partner of his joys and sorrows (and in return as often assaulted by her); as a bad neighbour, scuffling with his kind whenever he meets them--in each of these respects he presents himself to the severely moral mind as undeserving of respect. Yet with something of the eccentricity of judgment which commends to public regard the truly infamous Punch, who hangs the hangman, kills his wife, and throws the baby out of the window, we persist in looking upon the sparrow, with all his notorious faults, as a popular favourite and resent any serious exposure of his obliquities. "Touch not the little sparrow, who doth build His home so near us. He doth follow us From spot to spot amidst the turbulent town And ne'er desert us. To all other birds The woods suffice, the rivers, the sweet fields, But he doth herd with man."