The poor bird was uncommonly wary: he would spy one out hundreds of yards away and disappear in a wonderful manner, seeing that he could not fly. At last some Ship Canal workmen caught him. I got him from them and kept him for three months, but though he ate pretty well it did not seem to do him much good, and he never became in the least tame to the day of his death. We have often hoped that rooks would build in the garden; they come sometimes to the higher trees as though they had thoughts of doing so, but they have not gone beyond that as yet. In some years when acorns are ripe many rooks come here to get them (in 1911, although acorns were extraordinarily abundant, I hardly saw a single rook). I have never seen them pick up the acorns on the ground, as the jays and wood-pigeons do, but they gather them fresh for themselves from the tree. More than once I have seen a single rook pursuing a hawk, and, on the other hand, I have seen a rook put to flight by a missel-thrush. Rather a strange story was told me of a farmer's daughter at Heatley, near here. She lived by herself not far from the railway station, and every day, summer and winter alike, she fed a number of rooks that habitually waited on her bounty. One winter's day, it appears, she threw down food for a few rooks that were in a tree behind her house. The next day they were there again, and again she fed them, and so it grew into a regular thing, and they came expecting to be fed like so many fowls every day of the year. My informant often watched the proceeding, and said that the birds seemed to know their benefactress quite well and not to be at all afraid of her, though they were as shy of strangers as any other rooks. Skylarks are abundant in the neighbourhood, and often in the garden we hear one singing overhead. I have seen a lark singing his regular song on the ground, and have seen one perched on iron railings by the side of a road holding a largish brown moth in its bill, and at the same time uttering repeatedly two or three notes of its song. Larks are very fond of dusting in roads. I remember being struck one hot day in June by the number of dusting larks I met with in a ten-mile ride. Without any exaggeration there must have been one every twenty yards on an average for the whole distance. IX. OTHER BIRDS. The wild shriek of swifts, as they dash and wheel through the air at their topmost speed, seems to express such intense delight in freedom and motion and power, that it imparts something of the same sense of exhilaration to the beholder, at least, I know it is so with me.