keep them together, that they may not stray or lose each the other
in the dark.

The evening proceedings and manoeuvres of the rooks are curious
and amusing in the autumn. Just before dusk they return in long
strings from the foraging of the day, and rendezvous by thousands
over Selborne-down, where they wheel round in the air, and sport
and dive in a playful manner, all the while exerting their voices,
and making a loud cawing, which, being blended and softened by
the distance that we at the village are below them, becomes a
confused noise or chiding; or rather a pleasing murmur, very
engaging to the imagination, and not unlike the cry of a pack of
hounds in hollow, echoing woods, or the rushing of the wind in tall
trees, or the tumbling of the tide upon a pebbly shore. When this
ceremony is over, with the last gleam of day, they retire for the
night to the deep beechen woods of Tisted and Ropley. We
remember a little girl who, as she was going to bed, used to remark
on such an occurrence, in the true spirit of physico-theology, that
the rooks were saying their prayers; and yet this child was much
too young to be aware that the scriptures have said of the Deity --
that ' he feedeth the ravens who call upon him.'

I am, etc.



Letter LX
To The Honourable Daines Barrington

In reading Dr. Huxham's Observationes de Aere, etc., written at