"ROSALIND. Then shall we be news-crammed." When the mother pigeon feeds her young she brings the food, not in her beak like other birds, but in her crop; she places her beak between the open mandibles of her young, and fairly crams the food, which is delivered by a peculiar pumping movement, down its throat. She furnishes a capital illustration of the eager, persistent newsmonger. "Out of their burrows like rabbits after rain" is a comparison that occurs in "Coriolanus." In our Northern or New England States we should have to substitute woodchucks for rabbits, as our rabbits do not burrow, but sit all day in their forms under a bush or amid the weeds, and as they are not seen moving about after a rain, or at all by day; but in England Shakespeare's line is exactly descriptive. Says BOTTOM to the fairy COBWEB in "Midsummer Night's Dream:"-- "Mounsieur Cobweb; good mounsieur, get you your weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipp'd humble-bee on the top of a thistle, and, good mounsieur, bring me the honey-bag." This command might be executed in this country, for we have the "red-hipp'd humble-bee;" and we have the thistle, and there is no more likely place to look for the humblebee in midsummer than on a thistle-blossom. But the following picture of a "wet spell" is more English than American:-- "The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain, The plowman lost his sweat; and the green corn Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard; The fold stands empty in the drowned field, And crows are fatted with the murrain flock." Shakespeare knew the birds and wild fowl, and knew them perhaps as a hunter, as well as a poet. At least this passage would indicate as much:-- "As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye, Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort, Rising and cawing at the gun's report, Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky." In calling the choughs "russet-pated" he makes the bill tinge the whole head, or perhaps gives the effect of the birds' markings when seen at a distance; the bill is red, the head is black. The chough is a species of crow. A poet must know the birds well to make one of his characters say, when he had underestimated a man, "I took this lark for a bunting," as LAFEU says of PAROLLES in "All's Well that Ends Well." The English bunting is a field-bird like the lark, and much resembles the latter in form and color, but is far inferior as a songster. Indeed, Shakespeare shows his familiarity with nearly all the British birds. "The ousel-cock, so black of hue, With orange-tawny bill, The throstle with his note so true, The wren with little quill. "The finch, the sparrow, and the lark, The plain-song cuckoo gray, Whose note full many a man doth mark. And dares not answer nay." In "Much Ado about Nothing" we get a glimpse of the lapwing:--