onsists of squabblings
and disputings about vested rights.

"You're shoving me!" says one angry pigeon.

"That is a lie. This is my branch at any rate, and you've no business
here. Get off!" replies his neighbour, as quarrelsome to the full as he.

_Birds at Night_.

A dozen or two of starlings sit on the roof of an out-house--now an
unconsidered and uninteresting bird to many, yet fifty years ago Sir
Walter Scott rode twenty miles to see a nest of them. They are pretty
bird enough in the daytime, but they are more interesting at night. Now
they have their dress coats off and their buttons loosened. They sit and
gossip among each other like a clique of jolly students. And if one gets
a little sleepy and nods, the others will joggle him off the branch, and
then twitter with congratulatory laughter at his tumble. Let us get
beneath them quietly. We can see them now, black against the brightening
eastern sky. See that fellow give his neighbour a push with his beak,
and hear the assaulted one scream out just like Mr. Thomas Sawyer in
Sunday-school, whose special chum stuck a pin into him for the pleasure
of hearing him say "Ouch!"

As the twilight brightens the scuffling will increase, until before the
sun rises there will be a battle-royal, and then the combatants will set
to preening their ruffled feathers, disordered by the tumults and alarms
of the wakeful night.

The bats begin to seek their holes and corners about an hour before the
dawn, if the night has been clear and favourable. The moths are gone
home even before this, so that there is little chance of seeing by
daylight the wonderfully beautiful undervests of peacock blue and straw
colour which they wear beneath their plain hodden-grey overcoats.

_The Coming of the Dawn_.

It is now close on the dawning, and the cocks have been saying so from
many farm-houses for half an hour--tiny, fairy cock-crows, clear and
shrill from far away, like pixies blowing their horns of departure, "All
aboard for Elfland!" lest the hateful revealing sun should light upon
their revels. Nearer, hoarse and raucous Chanticleer (of Shanghai
evidently, from the chronic cold which sends his voice deep down into
his spurs)--thunders an earth-shaking bass. 'Tis time for night hawks to
be in bed, for the keepers will be astir in a little, and it looks
suspicious to be seen leaving the pheasant coverts at four in the
morning. The hands of the watch point to the hour, and as though