year it began to look dingy; and, blackening every succeeding year,
it became coal-black at the end of four. Its chief food was hemp-
seed. Such influence has food on the colour of animals! The pied
and mottled colours of domesticated animals are supposed to be
owing to high, various, and unusual food.

I had remarked, for years, that the root of the cuckoo-pint (arum)
was frequently scratched out of the dry banks of hedges, and eaten
in severe snowy weather. After observing, with some exactness,
myself, and getting others to do the same, we found it was the
thrush kind that searched it out. The root of the arum is remarkably
warm and pungent.

Our flocks of female chaffinches have not yet forsaken us. The
blackbirds and thrushes are very much thinned down by that fierce
weather in January.

In the middle of February I discovered, in my tall hedges, a little
bird that raised my curiosity: it was of that yellow-green colour that
belongs to the salicaria kind, and, I think, was soft-billed. It was no
paws, and was too long and too big for the golden-crowned wren,
appearing most like the largest willow-wren. It hung sometimes
with its back downwards, but never continuing one moment in the
same place. I shot at it, but it was so desultory that I missed my
aim.

I wonder that the stone curlew, charadrius oedicnemus, should be
mentioned by the writers as a rare bird: it abounds in all the
campaign parts of Hampshire and Sussex, and breeds, I think, all
the summer, having young ones, I know, very late in the autumn.