EEN SHOT AT.]

"Sparrow," said I, "to speak disrespectfully of the battue places you at
once outside the pale. You _are_ an Avian Rat. You _do_ consume an
inordinate quantity of corn. Since history began you have been an impudent
parasite on man. As a hieroglyphic character you signified the enemy.
Choleric old gentlemen have been roused to frenzy over your misdeeds. You
have been shot at, trapped, poisoned, netted. Like the chafers, you have
been excommunicated. You have been made into a yearly tribute, by the
thousand. Laws have been enacted to compass your destruction, letters have
been written to the _Field_, and yet--and yet--an inscrutable Providence
has decreed that you shall survive, increase, and multiply. What _good_ do
you do?"

[Illustration: TRAPPED.]

"Have you ever heard me sing?" said the sparrow.

"Sing!" I cried; "that sempiternal twitter, that intolerable chirrup that
destroys the best and latest hours of sleep! Do you call that singing?"

"What bird would you prefer?" he blandly inquired.

I considered for a moment. The grim possibility of ten thousand
nightingales yodelling in chorus, of ten thousand skylarks, or of ten
thousand cuckoos, determined my answer.

"I cannot think of one," said I. "But this is no merit on your part, it is
merely a qualification of evil."

[Illustration: NETTED.]

"I thought you would acknowledge _that_," said the sparrow. "But,
seriously, you ask me what good I do, and I will tell you. That my infant
food consisted entirely of insects and caterpillars you already know. Turn
the statistician to work who has so cunningly reduced my corn-depredations
to pounds, shillings, and pence, and he will assuredly find that the
insects devoured by the infant sparrow population in a year will amount to
hundreds of millions. These, mind you, are insects large enough to be
brought to us in our parent's beaks.

[Illustration: AVIAN RAT, INDEED! RATHER AVIAN SCAVENGER!]

"But what of the insect eggs devoured by us in winter, when most of your
pretty insect-eating birds have flown to where the insect is commoner,
fatter, and fuller-flavoured? It is we stay-at-home British birds that
really keep the insects down. I know that insect eggs do not appear in our
poor dissected gizzards. How should they? How would you recognize their
remains, O sapient sparrow-shooters? But they are there, for all that.
Those blessed with eyes can see us hunting for them in the fallen leaves,
among t