last about three minutes, then the bird would unbend or unstiffen and
take a few hops about the bush, then stiffen and begin again. While thus
gazing and listening I, by chance, met with an experience of that rare
kind which invariably strikes the observer of birds as strange and
almost incredible--an example of the most perfect mimicry in a species
which has its own distinctive song and is not a mimic except once in a
while, and as it were by chance. The marsh warbler is our perfect
mocking-bird, our one professional mimic; while the starling in
comparison is but an amateur. We all know the starling's ever varying
performance in which he attempts a hundred things and occasionally
succeeds; but even the starling sometimes affects us with a mild
astonishment, and I will here give one instance.

I was staying at a village in the Wiltshire downs, and at intervals,
while sitting at work in my room on the ground floor, I heard the
cackling of a fowl at the cottage opposite. I heard, but paid no
attention to that familiar sound; but after three days it all at once
struck me that no fowl could lay an egg about every ten or twelve
minutes, and go on at this rate day after day, and, getting up, I went
out to look for the cackler. A few hens were moving quietly about the
open ground surrounding the cottage where the sound came from, but I
heard nothing. By and by, when I was back in my room, the cackling
sounded again, but when I got out the sound had ceased and the fowls, as
before, appeared quite unexcited. The only way to solve the mystery was
to stand there, out of doors, for ten minutes, and before that time was
over a starling with a white grub in his beak, flew down and perched on
the low garden wall of the cottage, then, with some difficulty, squeezed
himself through a small opening into a cavity under a strip of zinc
which covered the bricks of the wall. It was a queer place for a
starling's nest, on a wall three feet high and within two yards of the