shift for himself and then he follows the elders of his kin to assist them in thinning the abundant crop of hairy caterpillars in more southern climes.

Another very useful bird is the starling, but it is placed in the second class because of a certain partiality for ripening cherries, which possibly have for it all the fascination and added sweetness of stolen fruit. But it would seem that this is the only direction in which it levies toll for its great services. It feeds largely on injurious insects and occasionally varies its diet by partaking of daddy long-legs, centipedes, earwings and earthworms. During the nesting season it is particularly active. From the Field Notes we gather that a pair of starlings in a period of seventeen hours fed their young with no less than 269 insects of the injurious kind against only 4 that belonged to the beneficial group-a most convincing proof of the bird's utility.

The starling is never prepossessing in appearance and not always engaging in manner. Yet birdlovers delight in extolling the iridescent sheen of his plumage and his wonderful powers of mimicry. He is undoubtedly gifted with a very keen sense of humour which he manifests in many and various ways. He is a past master in the art of burlesque. With a few touches of his own he can reduce the sublime to the ridiculous. He will listen to a thrush's song and watch the effect on a passer-by who stops to hear it and then deliver himself of a travesty of the song in such wise as to make both the songster and the charmed listener feel that they are being held up to scorn for a pair of sentimental fools. His wit may savour of the Music Hall and you might call him the Harry Lauder of birdland. But since he has taken on himself the part of amusing others he has to cater for all tastes. The gallery will not appreciate his finer touches so he has at times to be broad in his humour; and you might occasionally be tempted to give a wrong meaning to his scientific name of Sturnus vulgaris and not call him, as you should, the common, but the vulgar starling. But he is not really vulgar. Very often when he seems to be, he is only satirising the vulgarity of others. So inexhaustible is his fund of animal spirits that from time to time he cannot help perpetrating a practical joke or indulging in a little horse play.

He will maliciously hang round the corner, apparently absorbed in his own affairs, while a busy companion arranges in its nest the feathers it has laboriously collected; the moment the industrious bird has gone forth for a fresh supply, he will quietly transfer the feathers to his own nest and then for sheer delight he will give several long-drawn whistles of self-approbation.

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A grimy chimney top on a rainy day is not a very cheerful situation. Yet the starling will not let it hamper the exuberance of his spirits. With Mark Tapley he holds that there is "no merit in being jolly" under ordinarily favourable conditions, but he says to himself here is an occasion for coming out strong." So he walks round the chimney-top waddling sedately like a duck and round again with the measured step of a Dorking cock. Then he looks down the flue with that comic sidelong glance of his and chuckles to himself at some future prospect of hurling down its sooty length the noisy cock sparrow that is for ever chattering on the gutter. True, he will shudder at the passing thought of his own feelings, if by misadventure he were himself pushed down instead. But it was only a passing thought and he will not allow himself to dwell on it. Like a dog after a swim he gives a vigorous shake to his whole person as if to cast far from him all gloomy imaginings and he smoothes down his ruffled feathers to accord with the unruffled calm within. He then proclaims from the house-top that he has at last discovered where the blackbird got his coat "so black of hue"; he calls on all the inhabitants of birdland to come and see. But when they, too solicitous for their own coats in the rain, heed him not, he sings for his own delectation snatches of all the comic songs in his well stocked repertoire. Even when all the birds of the air are a-sighing and asobbing" he remains quite unimpressed; he looks down from the same high eminence with an outrageously cheerful mien, and with a gaiety altogether out of keeping with the solemnity of the function down below he warbles the vanished cockrobin's most joyful ditty.

The heron is a bird we are glad to find so high on the list as to deserve a place in our second class. He is indeed a much abused bird, not precisely as regards what is actually

said of him but in all that is implied. Anglers never have a good word for him; when his name crops up they shake their heads mindful of the innumerable fish that have been lost to the "gentle craft" in general and to their own baskets in particular. As a rule they refrain from comment. Like the costermonger who, though conspicuous for a choice vocabulary and a forcible style, simply remarked to the expectant audience round his apple cart, accidentally upset by a vanished taxi-cab, "There ain't no bloomin' word for it," they intimate that no language could possibly do justice to the subject. But when we look up the verdicts of the inquests on six herons that came by unexpected deaths, we find that two had partaken of voles, one of shrew, one of insects of the indifferent group, one of grass and only one of fish. Then we turn to the records of seventeen pellets that were examined and we read that all consisted of the remains (chiefly fur) of the water vole mixed with a few fragments of the water beetle and the water boatman. It is not, of course, suggested that the heron never does any damage; else he should be promoted to rank with the birds of the first class. He is in the second only for the occasional fish that he poaches. But we might apply to him the words which the Scotch Bard addressed to the field-mouse:

"I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;

What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!

An occasional fish, like "a daimen icker in a thrave, 's a sma' request." If anglers would only grudge him not his tithe they would, doubtless, "get a blessing wi' the lave, and never miss't." But how explain the prejudices entertained for the bird by Walton's disciples? It must be confessed that appearances are against the heron; he looks every inch a rival to the artists of the angle; he sports the orthodox grey, uses waders and a gaff; he has the proverbial meditative disposition of those who indulge in "the contemplative man's recreation"; he is silent while pursuing the craftthough possibly in private life he may be an adept at fishing stories. We presume, however, that he would tell of the unprecedented size and the enormous weight of the water vole, rather than of the fish, which by striking too soon or

not soon enough, he just missed. And like all rivals he has his shortcomings: he is not a sportsman; killing is for him a business and not a pastime; he does not play his victim keeping it on tenter hooks and gloating over the writhings of its agony until the flame of life has flickered almost to its close; with one fell stroke he mercifully kills outright. These, of course, are unpardonable sins and he has to live and die under a cloud of suspicion. It is only at his autopsy that he is vindicated.

The skylark, whom the poets love to hail as a blithe spirit that from heaven or near it poureth his full heart, is in reality, from our unpoetic point of view, ever a bird and very much in the flesh. Not only does he not partake of the ambrosia and sip the nectar supplied on Mount Olympus, but he regales himself freely on the food of ordinary mortals which the less elevated regions furnish. Much might indeed be forgiven him for his sweet strains of unpremeditated art, but there is not much to forgive. A few insects of the beneficial group and some fragments of turnip leaves are far outbalanced by the many injurious insects and seeds of noxious weeds that go to appease his healthy appetite. But we hope he will not take it amiss when he finds himself from our classification in the rather unmusical company of the starling, the heron, the kestrel, the buntings and the owls. Hitherto, no doubt believing all the poets have said, he has held aloof from other birds. But we are living in a democratic age, when one bird is antecedently as good as another and each has to stand on his own merits. And in our second class each one has, to his praise and blame, as much good and as little harm as every other bird of that somewhat mixed company.

We fear we have allowed the useful birds to crowd out those that are harmful. But this is only as it should be. They are, as we have seen, more numerous, and the aggregate good done by birds causes the harm to sink into an insignificance from which we would be loath to raise it. Besides the harm that birds do is already too liable to live after them in man's memory, the good, if ever recalled, is too oft interred with their bones.

VOL. XLIII.-No. 500.

8

EV

COUNT DE MUN

VEN the death of a great Pope attracted in these troubled days comparatively scant attention; more easily then might a son of the Church, however distinguished, pass away almost unnoticed. Yet it would be a wrong to ourselves no less than to him who is gone to let silence and forgetfulness close over the name of Count Albert de Mun, who died on October 26th, 1914. Engrossed in our own affairs, we have little time to keep our eyes on the great men of other nations, and the Count de Mun was not well known among us; but as a Catholic and citizen of the universal Church we may claim him as our own and treasure his memory. He will be remembered in France as an orator, a man of genius, a social reformer, and a wielder of almost unparalleled influence in the French Chamber; but of wider value is his example of a great life based entirely on Catholic principles.

France presents to us some strange anomalies. She has driven religious orders over her frontiers. She has secularised, and thus made meaningless, education. She has confiscated ecclesiastical property. In short, her Government has stained its reputation by the most unscrupulous and systematic attack on religion known to modern times. It would appear that there is something sadly wanting in the character of her Catholic population to make the continuance of such things possible. But, on the other hand, we find France still preeminent in many fields of Catholic enterprise. In the remodelling of modern society on the lines marked out by Pope Leo XIII. we take largely from her our methods of study and organisation. The foreign missions, which mean so much for the honour and vigorous life of the Church, draw their resources chiefly from France. And she still produces, as she has always produced, sons and daughters eminent for