some consideration, but with no particular care on my part, it has maintained itself in more or less quantity in the same herbaceous border ever since.

In 1897, a single plant of an "Allium" appeared and grew to a height of more than five feet, straight up with very stout stems, one and a half inches in circumference, and handsome heads of reddish-green bell-shaped flowers on drooping stalks, which afterwards, in fruit, became quite straight and upright. I found it to be "Allium Dioscorides," a native of Sicily and Sardinia. There were many tubers at the root when I took it up, but none of them ever grew so tall and fine as the original.

One or two plants that I have introduced myself have proved very tiresome weeds. In 1875 or thereabouts, I brought back from the wild part of a large garden in the neighbourhood a balsam with rather a conspicuous yellow flower ("Impatiens noli-me-tangere," I think). It made itself at home at once, but as it would keep within no bounds, I have done all I could "to get without it," as they would say here, but it defies me to my face and in spite of relentless persecution, again and again every spring it comes up smiling in an abundant crop.

So indeed does a tall polygonum ("P. cuspidatum" I believe it is) that I brought back from the same garden about the same time. It absolutely refuses to budge from the place where I first allowed it to grow. It does not perpetuate itself by seed like the balsam, but from little odds and ends of rootlets and suckers that hide themselves in the soil.

What I take to be a variety of "Oxalis corniculata," a very pretty little thing with dark reddish-brown leaves and deep yellow flowers, is another uncontrollable subject. It is perennial and yet increases by seed as fast as a balsam.

A plant which on the top of a stone wall is very pretty, "Linaria vulgaris," has proved a veritable plague to me in the garden. I had it sent to me originally by a nurseryman for the "Peloria" variety, and as if the disappointment of that were not enough, it added insult to injury, or rather injury to insult, by running below the surface in a provoking and persevering manner and showing itself in most unexpected places. Although the normal "vulgaris" is so irrepressible, I have found "Peloria" quite the reverse, and have never been able to keep it above a year or two.

The double-flowered varieties of most plants are, as a rule, more difficult than the ordinary single, but a little potentilla ("reptans" ?) with a yellow ball of double flower has proved an exception here. No single-flowered plant could get over and under the ground faster than this has done.

In 1886, in an out-of-the-way path among trees, an orchid, "Epipactis latifolia," came up in the very middle. I took care that it was not disturbed, and found it again in exactly the same place four years later, no sign of it having been seen in the interval. Never before, or since, have I found a plant of that or any other orchis growing wild in the garden.

One year (1887) in a border nearly full of rhododendrons, close to the front door, a curious looking thing made its way above the ground, which, at first sight might have been put down as something between a hyacinth and a lily-of-the-valley, but was said to be "Muscari comosum." I had never planted it and during the fifteen years that I had been here had never seen anything like it. I very carefully marked the spot when it died down, but from that time to this (1911) during all the 24 years that have passed it has never shown itself again.

III.

Birds—Thrushes.

You can feel something like affection even for a plant, when you have watched over it and attended to its likes and dislikes as to aspect, soil, moisture, shade and so on, and when it has responded to your care and rewarded you for the pains you have spent upon it, but birds become personal friends, it is an interest and amusement to study their characters and habits, and a delight to listen to their voices. And this friendship is not for any one particular bird (though of course there may be that sometimes), but for the particular species of bird, any one of which that you happen to meet with anywhere seems like an old friend. A lively impudent tom-tit for instance is the same amusing companion and it is the same pleasure to hear his cheery note, whether you find him in a suburban garden or in some shady corner of a wood.

Of course it is a day to be marked with a white stone when you come across a new or a rare bird, but if you watch the commonest sympathetically and intelligently you have an endless fund of interest and amusement. The quarrels, the loves, the boldness and ingenuity even of a sparrow may divert your mind pleasantly and help you to put away worries. Then how eagerly in spring does one listen for the first note of a willow-warbler, what an interest is the first sight of a swallow, and how gladly one welcomes each of our summer visitors as in turn they arrive from passing the winter in the Sahara oases or among our friends in the Transvaal or Cape Colony.

In a country unexplored or newly settled it may not be the same, but in England there is no need to spoil the charm of friendship by use of the collector's gun. All British birds have been so well illustrated and described that it ought to be possible to tell most of them by careful observation without actually having them in one's hand. In the interests of science, to make sure of the discovery of a new species or the distribution of a known one, birds must sometimes be shot (and after all to be shot is a less cruel end than to fall a prey to their natural enemies), but to shoot a well-known bird simply for the sake of its skin is another matter. A man who shoots every rare bird he sees, that he may add it to his private collection, is sacrificing bird-life for his own selfish pleasure and disregarding the sentiments and interests of the great body of nature-lovers and students. The true naturalist does not collect specimens as he would postage stamps; to study the life of a wren in its natural surroundings is more to him than anything he can do with the dried skin of a golden eagle.

They say that there is in Switzerland a law which forbids the shooting of any bird without a licence. If some such law could be enforced here, rare birds that seek hospitality among us would no longer be at the mercy of every idle lout who happens to have a gun. And is it impossible that children might be taught to find pleasure in watching, and not, as seems generally the case now, in destroying life?

We often have a pair of missel-thrushes ("shercocks" in Cheshire) nesting here. Generally they build in a tree at some distance away, where they make their presence known by noisy attacks on other birds; but once they had their nest in a Scotch fir close to the house, and then they were so quiet as almost to escape notice altogether.

There were two nests in the old churchyard this year (1912). One in a Spanish Chestnut was about thirty feet from the ground, in the middle of a clump of little shoots that grew straight up on the top side of a thick branch. This branch overhangs a patch of grass running close to the boundary wall and on this green boys were playing football with much shouting and noise every evening. The nest stood out plainly to be seen, and for a week before they flew (which they did on April 20th) you could easily count all four young ones. The other nest was in a yew, under which there is a seat in summer, and was simply set on the top