Worst of all birds that can have no peace in their lives so long as you are in sight is the pewit. The harsh wailing sound of his crying voice as he wheels about overhead, the mad downward rushes, when his wings creak as he nears you, give the idea that he is almost crazed with anxiety; and one feels ashamed at causing so much misery. Oh, poor bird! is there no way to make you understand without leaving the ground, that your black-spotted, olive-coloured eggs are perfectly safe; that a man can walk about on the heath and be no more harmful to you than the Forest ponies, and the ragged donkey browsing on a furze bush, and the cow with her tinkling bell? I stand motionless, looking the other way; I sit down to think; I lie flat on my back with hands {43} clasped behind my head, and gaze at the sky, and still the trouble goes on--he will not believe in me, nor tolerate me. There is nothing to do but get up and go away out of sight and sound of the pewits. It appears to me that this sympathy for the lower animals is very much a matter of association--an overflow of that regard for the rights of and compassion for others of our kind which are at the foundations of the social instinct. The bird is a red- and a warm-blooded being--we have seen that its blood is red, and when we take a living bird in our hands we feel its warmth and the throbbing of its breast: therefore birds are related to us, and with that red human blood they have human passions. Witness the pewit--the mother bird, when you have discovered or have come near her downy little one--could any human mother, torn with the fear of losing her babe, show her unquiet and disturbed state in a plainer, more understandable way! But in the case of creatures of another division in the kingdom of life--non-vertebrates, without sensible heat, and with a thin colourless fluid instead of red blood, as if like plants they had only a vegetative life--this sympathy is not felt as a rule. When, in some exceptional case, the feeling is there, it is because some human association has come into the mind in spite of the differences between insect and man.