This deep-toned cry is rarely heard now in our British marshlands, where the bird now comes only to be shot and sent to the shop of the bird preserver. It has, of course, been getting scarcer every year. In Selby’s time it was very scarce in some seasons, yet he records the fact that in the winter of 1830 to 1831 ten bitterns were exposed for sale on one morning in Bath, and sixty were taken the same season in Yorkshire. “Butter-bumps” was the popular name for the noisy bird, which, as some said, bellowed like a bull. The late Lord Lilford wrote that he knew a lady who said that when she was first married, about the year 1845, and went to live in East Norfolk, she was constantly kept awake by the Bittern’s booming in the neighbouring marshes. Tennyson’s farmer called it the bogle. Some of us were not sorry to hear that one of these rare visitors had been able to have its revenge on one of its persecutors lately. Being wounded only, it turned on the dog of “the man with the gun,” who could not resist shooting a stranger, and used its strong bill and claws to good purpose. Its haunts are reed-beds, and the nest is composed of dried flags and reeds. Its flesh is said to taste and look like that of the leveret, with a slight flavour of wild-fowl, and to be more bitter eating than that of the young Heron. In the North Kent marshes Bitterns were called “Yaller French Herns,” and the fen dwellers could get half a guinea for each bird. In France, of a coarse and stupid man, they often say, “C’est un vrai butor (Bittern);” Molière says, “Peste soit du gras butor;” and Georges Sand wrote, “If your provincial bourgeois heard that, they would take our daughters for ‘des butordes,’[6] such as their own are.” Voltaire speaks again of “les butorderies de cet univers.” In Saxony again the peasants say of a noisy brawler, “He booms like a Bittern.”