In Ireland, according to Mr. Thompson,[1] the Wheatear arrives much later than in England, and does not stay the winter. With regard to Scotland, Macgillivray states[2] that it is nowhere more plentiful than in the outer Hebrides, and in the Orkney and Shetland Islands; and from the fact of his having observed the species near Edinburgh on the 28th of February, we may infer that a few, as in England, occasionally remain throughout the year. The number of Wheatears which used to be taken years ago upon the South Downs in autumn was a matter of notoriety. “Hereabouts,” says an old chronicle of East-Bourne, “is the chief place for catching the delicious birds called Wheatears, which much resemble the French Ortolans;” and Wheatears play an important part in the history of this town. Squire William Wilson, of Hitching, Lord of the Manor of East-Bourne, was in Oliver Cromwell’s time vehemently suspected of loyalty to the Stuarts; and one Lieutenant Hopkins, with a troop of dragoons, swooped down on Eastbourne to search the squire’s house, and, if needful, arrest him as a Malignant. The squire was laid up with the gout; but Mistress Wilson, his true wife, with the rarely-failing shrewdness of her sex, placed before Lieutenant Hopkins and his troopers a prodigious pie filled with Wheatears, “which rare repast,” the chronicle goes on to say, “the soldiers did taste with so much amazement, delight, and jollity,” that the squire upstairs had ample time to burn all the papers which would compromise him, and when Lieutenant Hopkins, full of Wheatear pie, came to search the house, there was not so much treasonable matter found as could have brought a mouse within peril of a _præmunire_. At the Restoration the Lord of the Manor became Sir William Wilson of Eastbourne, a dignity well earned by his devotion to the Royal cause; but the chronicle goes on to hint that Charles II. was passionately fond of Wheatears, and that possibly the liberality of the squire, in supplying his Majesty’s table with these delicacies, may have had something to do with the creation of the baronetcy.