The Wren is certainly the most lively of little birds. With its confiding nature, especially in winter, it approaches close to men, and with lightning speed dashes into the openings and gaps in the wood stack. It is visible only for a moment at a time, and, with its little upright tail, its nodding and see-sawing, its appearing and disappearing, its popping in and out, it disposes even the most morose persons to cheerfulness. It slips through the prickliest bunch of blackthorn like the nimblest mouse, and has scarcely vanished on one side, before it appears on the other, shoots about like an arrow and is quickly lost in the neighbouring hedge. It does not fly far. If it finds itself in difficulties in the open, it slips into a mouse-hole. It feeds on the tiniest, and most hidden insects. It finds the smallest spiders, caterpillars, chrysalises, and grubs, which it wants, with skill and inexhaustible energy. It is found both in summer and winter with us. This little bird has also its song, which is louder than might be expected, suggesting somewhat that of the Canary. A listener to whom it is not known, is astonished if he happens to discover the tiny vocalist. It sings always in an open place. Its cry is “_Zrr’s Zezerr_.” A Lancashire naturalist writes of “the irrepressible vitality of the Wrens which prompts them to fling a song in the face of winter whenever they get a chance.” A chiding, chattering song it is; flung out also in advance of the intruding footsteps that disturb the [Illustration: USEFUL. THE WREN.] privacy of the hedge-row at the foot of which the bold, pert little creatures are seeking their food. In old nests in the thatch and holes in the walls, they find warmth and shelter during the winter, a little batch of them together. They are supposed to build special nests, “cocks’ nests,” they are called. A Staffordshire acquaintance tells how, being curious as to the number sleeping in one of these which he had previously noted in a grotto in his grounds, he and gardener surprised them one night by the light of a lanthorn, and no fewer than six Wrens fluttered out of the nest. Another friend who was fishing near Brambridge, in Hampshire, tells me that he knows one such nest under the thatch of an under-keeper’s cottage, and he has seen five or six enter this in the early twilight of a winter evening. On two different occasions, when a dogcart sent to the keeper’s cottage at which he puts up, was waiting for him to drive to his day’s fishing, a Wren settled on the back of the standing horse, near the cottage door, and remained there for a few minutes, as though enjoying the warmth coming through the creature’s coat.