But now observe. Every time that I have seen such a flirtation start, it has always been interrupted. The mate, so sleepy before, yet must have had one eye open all the time. She is at once aroused to action: she dives, and attacks the strange hen after the fashion of Grebes, from below, with an underwater thrust of the sharp beak in the belly. Whether the thrust ever goes home I do not know. Generally, I think, the offending bird becomes aware of the danger just in time, and, squawking, hastily flaps off. The rightful mate emerges. What does she do now? Peck the erring husband? Leave him in chilly disgrace? Not a bit of it! She approaches with an eager note, and in a moment the two are hard at it, shaking their heads; and, indeed, on such occasions you may see more vigour and excitement thrown into the ceremony than at any other time. Again we exclaim, how human! And again we see to what a pitch of complexity the bird’s emotional life is tuned. It will have been observed that in the Grebe, whose chief skill lies in its wonderful powers of diving, these powers have been utilized as the raw material of several of the courtship ceremonies. This pressing of the everyday faculties of the bird into the service of emotion, the elevation and conversion of its useful powers of diving and underwater swimming into ceremonials of passion, is from an evolutionary point of view natural enough, and has its counterparts elsewhere. So in the Divers, not too distant relatives of the Grebes, swimming and diving have their rôle in courtship. Here too the thrilling, vertical emergence close to the mate takes place; and there is a strange ceremony in which two or three birds plough their way through the water with body set obliquely--hinder parts submerged, breast raised, and neck stretched forward and head downward with that strange look of rigidity or tension often seen in the courtship actions of birds. Or, again, I once saw (strangely enough from the windows of the Headmaster’s house at Radley!) the aerial powers of the Kestrel converted to the uses of courtship. The hen bird was sitting in a large bush beyond the lawn. A strong wind was blowing, and the cock again and again beat his way up against it, to turn when nearly at the house and bear down upon the bush in an extremity of speed. Just when it seemed inevitable that he would knock his mate off her perch and dash himself and her into the branches, he changed the angle of his wings to shoot vertically up the face of the bush; then turned and repeated the play. Sometimes he came so near to her that she would start back, flapping her wings, as if really fearing a collision. The wind was so strong--and blowing away from me--that I could not hear what cries may have accompanied the display.