always the most delightful bends of the streams, the most charming nooks and corners of the waterways and pools that the kingfisher haunts. Where the scenery is open and tame, he is only a passer-by. But where his beauty adds the one charm of life, and beautiful life, that was needed to make some special "bit" of loveliness complete, there the kingfisher lives. It is a sweet little poem, this bird. Does it see any of the beauty that we do in these archways of willow and alder, this exquisite embroidery of forget-me-nots upon the brink, this clump of yellow flags and fair tall willow-herb? One could almost imagine that it does, so careful is it to pitch its camp just where Nature is at its best. Here the banks are flowered and prettily uneven with mossy stumps and roots "peeping out upon the brook." The moor-hen is at home here, and that delightful, harmless little beast the water-vole. I remember once seeing a water-vole sitting up at its front door in the sun, nibbling its crisp salad of young reed-shoot: on one side of it grew a tuft of "faint sweet cuckoo-flower," and just above it was a great rosette of primroses, and I thought I had never seen anything more enchanting than this quiet little touch of innocent and pretty spring. One of them has his hole yonder where there is a little overhanging bulge in the bank, and that little platform which seems neatly laid with rushes is his dining-room, and from it, running either way, you can easily trace the small animal's regular path to points where he can slip into the water quietly. If he were to jump in off his doorstep he would make a splash: a great indiscretion in a water-rat. So he toddles off to the right or the left as his fancy takes him, till he comes to a conveniently shelving place where he can take to water without noise. Under that green moss-furred root, over which his pathway so clearly goes, is the kingfisher's nest. The hole runs in straight for about three feet, and at the end is "the nest," and the little birds sitting in it can tell by the stoppage of the light at the entrance that father or mother has come back with a fish, and they hurry forward, crouching low, with out-stretched necks (for the tunnel is only three inches high), to get the food first. So the strongest or hungriest gets fed first, and when it has had enough it stays behind when the next race to the opening takes place, and the weaker or lazier take their turns till all are satisfied. And this is the simple explanation of that which so often puzzles people--"How do the old birds know that all the young ones have been fed? can they count, or do they know them all one from the other?"