up the vessel and smartly tapping its bottom get the solid contents of frozen milk into her hand, and carry it, for the amusement of the youngsters, about the house, from one room to another, as if it were a Dunlop cheese. Such a frost we have not had on the West Coast for at least a score of years. Our wild-bird levee of a morning is a most interesting scene--the most pleasant episode, perhaps, in the necessarily dull routine of a winter's day in the country. On these occasions we can depend on the presence of such birds as redbreasts, wrens, finches of all kinds, the lively and ubiquitous chaffinch, however, being most numerous; coral-billed blackbirds, shy at first, but easily made familiar and friendly enough; ox-eye tits, very pretty birds, but nervous and fidgety always; house and hedge sparrows, with a self-assertion and impudence that is most amusing, and a bold familiarity that would always place them in the front rank of bread-crumb recipients, if the redbreasts, seldom otherwise than quarrelsome and testy, did not drive them back. Most of those birds, when they found an open door or window, would boldly venture into the house, and eagerly pick up the bread crumbs from off the floor or table, undisturbed by anything one said or did, provided only you refrained from any attempt to lay hold of them; in that case they were off and out instantly, and in a manifest pet at your rudeness and inhospitality, shy to trust you again until the matter was forgotten, or perhaps only overlooked perforce of the inexorable logic of intense cold and gnawing hunger. All the birds that we have handled for more than a month past were but the merest skin and bone, emaciated to a degree altogether unknown in less severe winters. Curiously enough, however, we had a brace of woodcocks a few days ago which were as plump and fat as one could wish them; and some brace of snipe, shot in the neighbourhood of Inverness, kindly sent to us as a Christmas present, were in excellent condition, and good in every way. Why these long-billed, sucking birds should be fat, when all other birds are unnaturally lean, is to be accounted for by the fact that the intense frost drives the worms and minute animals which constitute their food into the open "eyes" and rivulets, which never freeze, like sheep in a fank; and thus the woodcock and snipe have their food with rather less trouble in frost than in more open weather. Some ten days ago, a very fine specimen of the jay (Corvus glandarius, Linn.; the Scriachan-Coille of the Gael) was sent us. This is one of our handsomest birds, and we are glad to say that it has within recent years become comparatively common in Lochaber. Like its congener the magpie, it is looked upon with considerable suspicion as an enemy to game; eating up, it is alleged, grouse, and partridge, and pheasant eggs as a favourite bonne bouche, and even devouring the newly hatched young. It is a shy and solitary bird, even where it is common, and we