other day, to notice that the mallard would attack the swans if they
took any food that he fancied. One would have thought that such powerful
birds as swans--one stroke of whose wings is supposed to be capable of
breaking a man's leg--would not have stood any nonsense from an
unusually diminutive mallard. But not a bit of it: the mallard ruled the
roost; all the other birds, even the great swans, ran away from him when
he attacked them from behind with his beak. This state of things
continued for some days. But after a time the male swan got tired of the
game; his patience was exhausted. Watching his opportunity he seized the
pugnacious little mallard by the neck and gave him a thundering good
shaking! It was most laughable to watch them. It is characteristic of
swans that they are unable to look you in the face; and beautiful beyond
all description as they appear to be in their proper element, meet them
on dry land and they become hideous and uninteresting, scowling at you
with an evil eye.

Sometimes as you are walking under the trees on the banks of the Coln
you come across a little heap of chipped wood lying on the ground. Then
you hear "tap, tap," in the branches above. It is the little nuthatch
hard at work scooping out his home in the bark. He sways his body with
every stroke of his beak, and is so busy he takes no notice of you. The
nuthatch is very fond of filberts, as his name implies. You may see him
in the autumn with a nut firmly fixed in a crevice in the bark of a
hazel branch, and he taps away until he pierces the shell and gets at
the kernel. Nuthatches, which are very plentiful hereabouts, are
sometimes to be found in the forsaken homes of woodpeckers, which they
plaster round with mud. The entrance to the hole in the tree is thus
made small enough to suit them. Sometimes when I have disturbed a
nuthatch at work at a hole in a tree, the little fellow would pop into
the hole and peep out at me, never moving until I had departed.

Woodpeckers are somewhat uncommon here: I have not heard one in our
garden by the river for a very long time, though a foolish farmer told
me the other day that he had recently shot one. A mile or so away, at
Barnsley Park, where the oaks thrive on a vein of clay soil, green
woodpeckers may often be seen and heard. What more beautiful bird is
there, even in the tropics, than the merry yaffel, with his emerald back
and the red tuft on his head? The other two varieties of woodpeck