Of course it is a day to be marked with a white stone when you come across a new or a rare bird, but if you watch the commonest sympathetically and intelligently you have an endless fund of interest and amusement. The quarrels, the loves, the boldness and ingenuity even of a sparrow may divert your mind pleasantly and help you to put away worries. Then how eagerly in spring does one listen for the first note of a willow-warbler, what an interest is the first sight of a swallow, and how gladly one welcomes each of our summer visitors as in turn they arrive from passing the winter in the Sahara oases or among our friends in the Transvaal or Cape Colony. In a country unexplored or newly settled it may not be the same, but in England there is no need to spoil the charm of friendship by use of the collector's gun. All British birds have been so well illustrated and described that it ought to be possible to tell most of them by careful observation without actually having them in one's hand. In the interests of science, to make sure of the discovery of a new species or the distribution of a known one, birds must sometimes be shot (and after all to be shot is a less cruel end than to fall a prey to their natural enemies), but to shoot a well-known bird simply for the sake of its skin is another matter. A man who shoots every rare bird he sees, that he may add it to his private collection, is sacrificing bird-life for his own selfish pleasure and disregarding the sentiments and interests of the great body of nature-lovers and students. The true naturalist does not collect specimens as he would postage stamps; to study the life of a wren in its natural surroundings is more to him than anything he can do with the dried skin of a golden eagle. They say that there is in Switzerland a law which forbids the shooting of any bird without a licence. If some such law could be enforced here, rare birds that seek hospitality among us would no longer be at the mercy of every idle lout who happens to have a gun. And is it impossible that children might be taught to find pleasure in watching, and not, as seems generally the case now, in destroying life? We often have a pair of missel-thrushes ("shercocks" in Cheshire) nesting here. Generally they build in a tree at some distance away, where they make their presence known by noisy attacks on other birds; but once they had their nest in a Scotch fir close to the house, and then they were so quiet as almost to escape notice altogether.