It may be that there are insects that play the part of mustard or Worcestershire sauce in the chaffinch world.  What a meal she is making in any case before she hurries back to her nest!  It seems that among the chaffinches the male is the more spiritual of the sexes.  But then he has so little to do compared with the female.  He is still in that state of savagery in which the male dresses finely and idles.

The thrush cannot carry on with the same indifference to cats.  He is the most nervous of parents, and spends half his time calling on his children to be careful.  The young thrush hopping about on the lawn knows nothing of cats and refuses to believe that they are dangerous.  He is not afraid even of human beings.  His parent becomes argumentative to the point of tears, but the young one stays where he is and looks at you with a sideways jerk of his head as much as to say:  “Listen to the old ’un.”  You, too, begin to be alarmed at such boldness.  You know, like the pitiful parent, that the world is a very dangerous place, and that your neighbour’s cat goes about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.  It has been contended by some men of science that all birds are born fearless after the manner of the young thrush, and that fear is a lesson that has to be taught to each new generation by the more experienced parents.  Fear, they say, is not an inherited instinct, but a racial tradition that has to be communicated like the morality of civilised people.  The young thrush on the lawn is certainly a witness on behalf of this theory.  He hops towards you instead of away from you.  He moves his gaping beak as though he were trying to say something.  If there were no cats in the world, you would encourage his confidences, but you feel that, much as you would like to make friends with him, you must, for his own sake, give him his first lesson in fear.  You try to give yourself the appearance of a grim giant:  it has no effect on him.  You make a quick movement to chase him away:  he runs a few yards and then stops and looks round at you as though you were playing a game.  It is too much to expect of you that you will actually throw stones at a bird for its good, and so you give up his education as a bad job.  Alas, in two days, your worst fears are justified.  His dead body is found, torn and ruffled, among the bushes.  Some cat has murdered him—­murdered him, evidently, not in hunger, but just for fun.  Two indignant children, one gold, one brown, discover the dead body and bring in the tale.  They prepare the funeral rites of one whose only sin was his innocence.  This is not the first burial in the garden.  There is already a cemetery marked with half-a-dozen crosses and heaped with flowers under the pear-tree on the south wall.  Here is where the mouse was buried; here where the starling; and here the rabbit’s skull.  They all lie there under the earth in boxes, as you and I will lie, expecting the Last Trump.  The robins are not kinder to the “friendless