flight of the kingfisher, and find its nest by the river-bank; to note the stately heron, patiently fishing in the stream, or sailing slowly off to another resting-place; to look out for the early arrival of the spring migrants; to hear the cuckoo's welcome voice, or, by the delightful turr-turr of the turtledoves in the woods, to be reminded that for six months, at least, we might say, with Virgil's Melibaeus:

"Nec gemere aeria cessabit turtur ab ulmo."

Pleasant, too, though telling of winter's approach, would it be to see every roof crowded with the swallow-tribe, and many a field by the cliffs covered with the beautiful yellow wagtails, when these birds were preparing to leave us for awhile for milder climes.

In October the woodcocks would pour in, so exhausted in the early morning from their flight, that you could almost pick them up as they feebly moped along the ditches. Later on towards winter, the Norwegian thrushes would arrive, the fieldfares and the redwings-the latter called by Linnæus the nightingale of Norway, but known by the local name of the wynnolall seeking a region milder than their native shores; and the motions of these birds it would be very interesting to observe through the cold weather, as they endeavoured to pick up a scanty sustenance from the lee sides of the hedges.

In this district the life of almost every kind of bird might be studied, even down to the very swans, which, when frozen out of their lake at Abbotsbury, inside the eastern shore of the great bay, might be seen and heard winging their way down the valley of the pleasant river, which flowed across three of the western shires to join the sea not far from Chalcombe Head. Interesting, too, would it be to see how the rare appearance of the kite would set all the small birds quivering; and to hear the poultry in the farmyard piteously proclaiming the appearance of the enemy overhead. Pleasant also would it ever be to see the flights of terns sweep gracefully by, or to note the dotterels flitting about the beach beside the cove. A bit of Nature's secrets would be the finding of the habitat, rare in the south of England, of the dipper or water-ouzel-a song-bird that dives and wades, and swims—to watch its motions under water, and to find its nest year after year in the same stream.

The view from the Head is one of the finest along our fine coast. At one end of the great bay there stretches, outside, the grey mass of Portland; at the other end we may see, in clear weather, past Torbay, Berry Head, and Dartmouth, that Start Point which bears, in its designation, the word which we have in the name of that pretty fire-tailed bird, common in the combes, the redstart. On a dark night we may watch with interest the varied revolving lights of the light-houses on these two extremities of the great bay. Then, at times, it is a glorious sight to see the sun set behind the distant tors of Dartmoor, and to catch

the twin granite peaks of Heytor standing out distinct against the glow and radiance of the western sky.

Öf historic and poetic memories, a perfect wealth lies all around. The inland heights, which we may catch with our eye, were a chain of hill-forts-now called burys or castles-which were fought over, and no doubt bled over, ages before the Romans or the English came over to conquer the land. Looking across to the three-shired river-valley we may see what is left of the house where was born the greatest of English commanders, the man under whom the English marched proudly to victory at Blenheim and Ramillies and Malplaquet. A little further up the same valley we look on the now sleepy little town which was the birthplace of the professor who bewitched Oxford with the charms of geology—a town which existed as a British village long before Roman times, and whose name is borne by a special kind of Turkey carpet, invented here, but now made in busier regions. A little below lies a grey-walled and ivy-clad ruin, which was the ancient home of the Courtenay family; and not far off was the home of the Bonvilles, a famous race that fought, and bled, and perished in the Wars of the Roses.

Close by, in the western combe, nestles picturesquely the house, now a farmhouse, where was born the founder of one of the Oxford Colleges; and, in the old village church, the attention of little boys used to be diverted from the sermon by counting the effigies of the founder's mother and the twenty children borne by her to her two husbands, which stood, in two little diverging rows, behind her. Not far off up the bay stands the little cobba quite local term for a pier or small harbour--where landed the invasion of the ill-fated Monmouth, known by the peasantry as King Monmouth, which came to so disastrous an end at Sedgemoor, the last battle that has been fought, or it is hoped will ever be fought, on English soil! On the other side of the bay, behind the Berry Head that we look across to, landed the later invasion by the Prince of Orange, which brought in the dynasty that now rules us.

Looking seawards we have immediately on our right a landslip, more than a century old, where lie

"Rocks, crags, and knolls, confusedly hurled,
The fragments of an earlier world,”

while halfway up the cliff is one of the mouths of a quarry of hard chalk that runs under the down-the other mouths being a mile inland—which has probably been worked for upwards of a thousand years, has furnished materials for almost all the old churches and edifices within a circuit of many miles, and has had its stones deftly carved and fashioned into the delicately shaped foliage, fretwork, and finial that we admire in the fine old cathedral at Exeter. All about us, too, lie sites associated with those great sailors who fought nobly-as so many Devonshire men did-in Britain's Salamis, the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Two or three out of many of the near poetic spots may well be recalled. Near the head of the neighbouring river dwelt Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, when Raisley Calvert had, by his legacy of £900, enabled them to cultivate their famous "plain living and high thinking;" here they were visited by Coleridge, and here the gifted trio would "walk the lovely meadows above the combes," and cultivate poetic intercourse, and enjoy from the hill-tops the glorious view over the whole of the great west bay.

In a very characteristic Devonshire village, lying just under one of the British hill-forts, was the home of the poet to whom we owe that well-known and affecting hymn, which the writer, with quiet humbleness, says " may be used living or dying," and a translation of which Laurence Oliphant heard the Armenians singing with tears in their church at Constantinople—

"Rock of Ages, cleft for me."

Just over the hills on the west is a sweet Devonshire rivervalley, where were born two very famous men. One was Samuel Taylor Coleridge—logician, metaphysician, bard—whom Wordsworth called

"The rapt one of the godlike forehead, the heaven-eyed creature,”

and of whom Swinburne says: "Of his best verses, I venture to affirm that the world has nothing like them, nor ever can have; they are of the highest kind, jewels of the diamond's price, flowers of the rose's rank, but unlike any rose or diamond known." This small town has been immortalised by Thackeray in Pendennis as "Clavering St. Mary," a slight variation only from its current name-and Thackeray's bits of description well set forth some of the charms of the scenery among which he spent some of his early days. "At sunset," he writes, "from the lawn of Fairoaks, which comes down to the little river Brawl, there was a pretty sight; it and the opposite park of Clavering were in the habit of putting on a rich golden tinge, which became them both wonderfully. The upper windows of the great house flamed, so as to make your eyes wink; the little river ran off noisily westward, and was lost in a sombre wood, behind which the towers of the old abbey-church of Clavering (whereby the town is called Clavering St. Mary to the present day) rose up in purple splendour."

Not far down the valley of the same "little river Brawl," there still stands, in good preservation, the farmhouse where was born one of the very foremost amongst the many worthies who adorned the spacious age of Queen Elizabeth-Sir Walter Raleigh. The proper pronunciation of the name is preserved by place-names about the spot, such as Combe-Raleigh, &c., just as the descendants of the family pronounce it still.

With scenes and spots like these, it is surely pleasant to be

able to associate a land so rich in all varieties of bird-life; and especially of that headland which stands prominent in its midst.

The flora of the region would well repay a study; but, for one article, the bird-life, together with a few of the local spots made memorable by famous men, may well stand alone; and the exact position of the headland may be veiled, though, to those who know it, as transparently veiled as Thackeray's "Clavering St. Mary," under the name of Chalcombe Head.

VIII.

A BIRD-HAUNTED PINE-GROVE.

N one of the loveliest spots along our pleasant coast lies a region that may well be called a bird-haunted pine-grove. At one end of the district there was slain, in early times, a king who was canonized, · and who has ever since been designated as a saint; while at the other end, there was shot a later king whom nobody has ever thought of calling a saint, but who was, in truth, even among kings of that day, one of the saddest of sinners. Between them is a district full of objects of varied and almost unsurpassable interest. Near the first end lies a well-known headland that bears the name, slightly perverted, of another saint who was an early English Bishop in the district. Among these sacred spots of saints, and death-sites of kings, are many fine rivers and estuaries, the favourite haunts of salmon, as in earlier times they had been of invading Norsemen ; and between the estuaries stands the pine-grove where, half a century ago, a shrewd landowner had the foresight to call in an architect and lay out pleasant slopes for building purposes, amidst banks clothed with gorse and broom, which had long been the resorts of the woodcock.

Nowhere can you hear the sweetest songsters of our groves to greater perfection than among the pines that have now, in many parts of this region, been nurtured up, or have grown up, to a great height and density. In early spring the thrushes and blackbirds make the whole district resound with their melody, singing out of sight in the pine-tops, as they love best to do. In no region do our sweetest songsters sing so beautifully as amid these pines. It is quite a mistake to suppose that birds sing everywhere with the same beauty of melody. Though their general style of song is, no doubt, the same everywhere, the cultivated ear, trained to bird-notes, can at once tell that the

song of the thrush is finer in one district than it is in another; that the flute-like notes of the blackbird are richer here than there; and that the jug-jug of the nightingale is here, perhaps, he may clearly be able to say, the most rapturous of all. And among these pines you can listen to them all in a beauty of melody unsurpassed.

It is pleasant here to look out for the coming of the spring migrants, and to catch their notes on their first arrival. In some small garden you may watch the coming in of the first whitethroat or warbler, and mark the familiarity with which, after a long flight from distant Africa, the little bird seems to recognise the spot where it was born, or where, perhaps, it might have reared a brood. Pleasant is it, too, to see the lark soaring and singing in circles over some small railway station, or to catch, in so unusual a place, the well-known note of the nightingale, and to learn from a bird-loving railway porter that the bird breeds yearly at a fitting spot near the station. The arrival of the swallows, martins and swifts can be well noted on the cliffs, along which they love to career in joyous course. The cuckoo, like the nightingale, does not seem to love the close neighbourhood of the sea, where, perhaps, these birds do not find the food they like best: they are to be heard and seen better a little way inland.

If we take a wider sweep around, we may come on moors and sand-wastes, with stunted pines and shrubby undergrowths, the only things here nourished by the sandy and gravelly soil. Here in some cultivated slope we may hear the landrail; and here, certainly, skimming past us like a phantom, we may see or hear the night-jar, finding abundant food among the moths and night-insects that are bred in multitudes on these breezy heaths. You may possibly drop on a brood of night-jars, fully feathered, but not yet having tried their wings, only able to scamper away among the fir- twigs and heather-shoots. Among the springs and rills that ooze out in the hollows, we may find the favourite haunts of the woodcock, though the bird is getting, year by year, scarcer here, as in other regions.

In walking about the district we may note many interesting aspects of bird-life. In some parts, the cooings of the ringdove or woodpigeon are very pleasant to listen to. This is the bird that the poets call the cushat dove, the name being probably derived from its note: and by this name it figures in Scott's couplet :

"In answer cooed the cushat dove,

Her notes of peace, and rest, and love."

The notes are not always, we may observe, notes of peace; for the birds (presumably the males, the fighting sex) seem often to enjoy a combat; and then they bow their heads to the ground, and coo their loudest, and fly up in encounter, and coo again, and go on to fight again for any length of time, and seem