a continuous and angry twittering.  On opening out the grass, I found the nest with three fresh eggs in it, placed right in the centre of the tuft and close to the ground.  The eggs were of a pale green ground-colour, covered with large irregular blotches of purplish brown, and not very unlike some of the eggs of Passer flavicollis.  After this I found several nests, but they were all building, and were one and all deserted, though in many instances I never touched the nest, often never saw it, as on seeing the birds flying in and out of the grass with building material in their bills I left the place and returned in ten days’ time, but only to find the nest deserted.  In one case where a single egg had been laid, I found that the bird before deserting the nest had broken the egg.  In July I again got a nest and shot the parent birds; the eggs in this nest were quite of a different type, being of a very pale cream ground-colour, with large rusty blotches, principally confined to the larger end.  The nests of this bird are composed of coarse grass, the inside being composed of the finer parts; they are 4 to 5 inches external diameter and 21/2 inches internal diameter, the cavity being about 11/2 inches deep.  The months in which they breed are, as far as I at present know, March, June, and September.  The eggs vary in size from .65 to .80 in length and from .50 to .55 in breadth.  The average of seven eggs is .72 in length and .54 in breadth.”

The eggs of this species vary somewhat in size and shape, but they are typically regular rather elongated ovals, rather obtuse at both ends, and often slightly compressed towards the small end.  The shell is fine and compact and has a slight gloss; the ground-colour is sometimes greenish white, sometimes faintly creamy.  The eggs are generally pretty thickly and finely speckled and scratched all over, and besides the fine markings there are a greater or smaller number of more or less large irregular blotches and splashes, chiefly confined to the large end.  These markings, large and small, are brown, very variable in shade, in some eggs reddish, in some chocolate, in some raw sienna, &c.  Besides these primary markings most eggs exhibit a number of paler subsurface secondary markings, varying in colour from sepia to lavender or pale purple; these are mostly confined to the large end (though tiny spots of the same tint occur occasionally on all parts of the egg), where with the large blotches they often form a more or less conspicuous and more or less confluent but always ill-defined zone or even cap.  Here and there an egg absolutely wants the larger blotches, but even in such cases the specklings are more crowded about the large end, and these with the lilac clouds still combine to indicate a sort of zone.

The eggs I possess of this species, sent me by Mr. Doig, vary from 0.71 to 0.81 in length by 0.52 to 0.59 in breadth; but the average of seven eggs is 0.72 by 0.55.

388.  Graminicola bengalensis, Jerd. The Large Grass-Warbler.