It is interesting to rear a few pheasants annually.  There is no bird which gives more delight, even if fairly tame; their beautiful colouring and cheerful crowing are always pleasant in the garden and woods around your house.  If you feed them every day, they will come regularly up to the very door; and with them come the swans, waddling up from the water, looking very much out of their element.  Sometimes, too, a moorhen will join the party; whilst two little wild ducks, the sole survivors of a brood of sixteen, which were attacked and killed by a stoat, will take food right out of the mouths of the good-natured old swans.  Peacocks I would not care to have round the house; but there is nothing more in touch with English country life than the glorious red, green, and brown colouring of a “fine” cock pheasant strutting proudly across the lawn on his way to his roosting-place in the firs, contrasting as he does with the majestic form and snowy plumage of the stately swans, which glide about the silent Coln at the bottom of the garden—­the incarnation of grace and symmetry.  Truly some of the most common of animals are also the most beautiful.

Besides the rooks, there is another bird which the farmers love to wage incessant war upon.  The other day I received the following message printed on the back of a postcard:—­

“A meeting will be held at the Swan Hotel, Bibury, on Friday, November 13th, at 6.30 p.m., to arrange about starting a Sparrow Club for the district.”

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“What is a Sparrow Club?” I anxiously enquired the other day of a labouring man, a particular friend of mine, whom I happened to fall in with on his way to chapel.  He answered that it was a club for killing sparrows when they get too numerous—­paying boys a farthing a head for every bird they catch, and giving prizes for the greatest number killed.  Boys may often be seen out at night, with long poles and nets attached to them, catching sparrows in the trees.  But my friend tells me that the way he likes to catch them is to go into a barn at night with a lantern.  “You must hold the lantern under your coat so as to half screen the light, and the birds will fly at the light and settle on your shoulders.”  He tells me you can pick them off your clothes by the dozen.  I have never tried it, certainly, as, personally, I have no quarrel with the sparrows.  I was disappointed that the “Sparrow Club,” for which a great public meeting had to be convened, was not of a more exciting nature.  One was led to believe by the importance of the printed postcard that some good old English custom was about to be revived.

A farmer has just brought me in a peregrine falcon that he shot this morning.  He is of course very proud of the achievement.  It is useless to argue with him on the question of preserving birds that are becoming scarce in England.  He considers that a rara avis such as this, which is “here to-day and gone to-morrow,” is a prize which does not often fall to the lot of the gunner; it must be bagged at all hazards.  Nor is it easy to answer the argument which he seldom fails to put forth, that if he doesn’t shoot it, somebody else will.