I am sorry that Miss Ormerod gives them such a bad character as to their appetites. But not being personally engaged in agriculture, I can only rejoice that nature has provided them with such strong constitutions, and healthy and active digestions. Beyond this, it is certainly a pleasure to a townsman to note their chatterings, their amicable, if noisy, contentions for the best places in the ivy, their demonstrative courtships, their dust-baths in the dry ground, or their water-baths in the pans provided for them for this purpose, and their evident love for the neighbourhood and companionship (at a properly regulated distance) of mankind. What a contrast there is between the active, fluttering, often noisy _House Sparrow_, and its quiet, retiring, and gentle-mannered neighbour, the _Hedge Sparrow_. This was well illustrated in the early part of last December, in this way; the Hedge Sparrow (or Dunnock or Accentor) does not often visit my garden, but one of these pretty birds did come at this time, and having incautiously entered the open door of my greenhouse, got shut up in it. Next morning, on my entering, it was, of course, somewhat frightened. But instead of violently fluttering about, and dashing itself against the window, as the House Sparrow will do in like circumstances, it very quietly and gently flew away from me, and then at once dropped down behind the brick flue, where it remained quiet and concealed, in spite of my efforts to find it, as I desired to do in order to give it its liberty. The same thing exactly happened on some following mornings; and being fed regularly, it has remained there to the present time, _i.e._ the date of this paper. There are plenty of other birds whose visits and whose peculiarities would provide abundant material for a paper much longer than I can venture now to inflict upon you. But they are all welcome for the sake of the varieties of life and habits they present—as well as for what Tennyson so prettily describes as their “singing and calling.” My grass-plot is the feeding-ground of the greedy and quarrelsome _Starlings_, which will often come for their meal of worms or other food at quite regular hours, usually at ten or eleven o’clock in the morning, and three to four in the afternoon. And occasionally the _Jackdaws_, from our neighbouring church-steeple, where they live and breed, will venture—most carefully and cautiously—to alight on the grass in search of food. Whilst even the Norwich _Rooks_ will, when hard pressed in bad weather, occasionally dart down from a tree for crusts of bread or other edible matter obtainable in the garden.