ash tree, whence he had a full view of the nest, and there he sat with much patience, preening his feathers, and uttering an occasional craa, as if to encourage the hen in her labours. No sooner did the latter, having deposited her egg, leave the nest with the usual cackle of self-congratulation, than Monsieur Corvus glided from his perch, and in a twinkling, by the dexterous use of head and bill, had the egg rolled out on the grass by the nest's side. Turning it round and round, and rolling it over and over, stepping back at times as if the better to contemplate its pearly whiteness and handsome proportions, and already in imagination rolling the sweet morsel under his tongue, he finally stepped forward, and with his pick-axe-like bill delivered a stroke at the egg's bigger end, which made a sufficiently large hole for him to suck away at comfortably. And how he did seem to enjoy it! Removing his bill now and again as if to draw breath, and looking up and around with an air of innocence and self-satisfaction that was exceedingly comical. Meanwhile, so intent was Corvus on his egg-flip, that we managed to creep quite close to the scene unperceived by him, resolved to give him a good fright at least, if we could do no more. We took advantage of a moment when he had his head buried in the egg up to the eyes to start to our feet, uttering at the instant a favourite shout of ours in such circumstances--a sort of war-whoop, a legacy, we suppose, from our Fingalian ancestors--and the happiness of Corvus, sucking his egg in such fancied security, vanished like a dream. With a prolonged cra-a-a he made a sudden dig into the egg in his fright, his bill passing clean through it, and spreading his wings he fluttered upwards, the egg sticking over his bill and eyes like a mask, and preventing him from seeing anything, and causing him to perform the most ridiculous evolutions ever exhibited perhaps by a bird on wing. Fluttering along obliquely, with many a dolorous cra-a, he came to the ground like a collapsed balloon in a neighbouring field, where we hoped to capture him, but just as we ran up to him he managed to shake the egg from his head, and in an instant was up and away and out of sight at a rate that must have brought him to Culloden Moor within the hour if he stopped not by the way. A bird rarely fails to profit by experience, least of all a crow, and we have no hesitation in saying that the particular rook in question will remember his egg-shell mask and our unearthly war whoop till his dying hour. And while on such subjects, let us ask the reader by the way if he has noticed that cocks don't crow now-a-days as they used to do? We refer of course to the common barndoor fowl--Gallus domesticus, the domestic cock. He, we assert, does not now-a-days crow with the same regularity and timeousness, nor with the clear, clarion notes with which he did "Salutation to the morn,"