finding them in the thick undergrowth.

About eleven o'clock the evening after shooting the young rooks I was
returning home from a neighbouring farmhouse when I heard the most
lamentable sounds coming from the rookery. There seemed to be a funeral
service going on in the big ash trees. Muffled cawings and piteous cries
told me that the poor old rooks were mourning for their children. I
cannot remember ever hearing rooks cawing at that time of night before.
Saving the lark, "that scorner of the ground," which rises and sings in
the skies an hour before sunrise, the rooks are the first birds to
strike up at early dawn. One often notices this fact on sleepless
nights. About 2.30 o'clock on a May morning a rook begins the grand
concert with a solo in G flat; then a cock pheasant crows, or an owl
hoots; moorhens begin to stir, and gradually the woodland orchestra
works up to a tremendous burst of song, such as is never heard at any
hour but that of sunrise.

"Now the rich stream of music winds along,
Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong,
Through verdant vales."

How often one has heard this grand thanksgiving chorus of the birds at
early dawn!

I wonder if the poor rooks caw all night long after the "slaughter of
the innocents?" They were still at it when I went to bed at 12.30, and
this was within two hours of their time of getting up.

"Some say that e'en against that season cornea
In which our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long."

Thus wrote Shakespeare of bold chanticleer; and perhaps the rooks when
they are grieving for their lost ones, hold solemn requiem until the
morning light and the cheering rays of the sun make them forget
their woes.

It is difficult to understand what pleasure the farmers find in shooting
young rooks with twelve-bore guns. Ours are always allowed a grand
_battue_ in the garden every year. They ask their friends out from
Cirencester to assist. For an hour or so the shots have been rattling
all round the house and on the sheds in the stable-yard. The horses are
frightened out of their wits. Grown-up men ought to know better than to
keep firing continually towards a house not two hundred yards away. A
stray pellet might easily blind a man or a horse.

Farmers are sometimes very careless with their guns. Out
partridge-shooting one is in mortal terror of the man on one's right,
who invariably carries his gun at such