among the tall flowering grasses and buttercups of the meadow—­a queer gaunt unfinished hobbledehoy-looking fowl with a head much too big for his body, a beak that resembled a huge nose, and a very monstrous mouth.  When I first noticed him he was amusing himself by picking off the small insects from the flowers with his big beak, a most unsuitable instrument, one would imagine, for so delicate a task.  At the same time he was hungering for more substantial fare, and every time a rook flew by over him on its way to or from a neighbouring too populous rookery, the young crow would open wide his immense red mouth and emit his harsh, throaty hunger-call.  The rook gone, he would drop once more into his study of the buttercups, to pick from them whatever unconsidered trifle in the way of provender he could find.  Once a small bird, a pied wagtail, flew near him, and he begged from it just as he had done from the rooks:  the little creature would have run the risk of being itself swallowed had it attempted to deliver a packet of flies into that cavernous mouth.  I went nearer, moving cautiously, until I was within about four yards of him, when, half turning, he opened his mouth and squawked, actually asking me to feed him; then, growing suspicious, he hopped awkwardly away in the grass.  Eventually he permitted a nearer approach, and slowly stooping I was just on the point of stroking his back when, suddenly becoming alarmed, he swung himself into the air and flapped laboriously off to a low hawthorn, twenty or thirty yards away, into which he tumbled pell-mell like a bundle of old black rags.

Then I left him and thought no more about the crows except that their young have a good deal to learn upon first coming forth into an unfriendly world.  But there was a second nest and family close by all the time.  A day or two later I discovered it accidentally in a very curious way.

There was one spot where I was accustomed to linger for a few minutes, sometimes for half an hour or so, during my daily walks.  Here at the foot of the low bank on the treeless side of the stream there was a scanty patch of sedges, a most exposed and unsuitable place for any bird to breed in, yet a venturesome moorhen had her nest there and was now sitting on seven eggs.  First I would take a peep at the eggs, for the bird always quitted the nest on my approach; then I would gaze into the dense tangle of tree, bramble, and ivy springing out of the mass ’of black rock and red clay of the opposite bank.  In the centre of this rough tangle which overhung the stream there grew an old stunted and crooked fir tree with its tufted top so shut out from the light by the branches and foliage round it that it looked almost black.  One evening I sat down on the green bank opposite this tangle when the low sun behind me shone level into the mass of rock and rough boles and branches, and fixing my eyes on the black centre of the mass I encountered a pair of crimson eyes staring back into mine.  A level ray of light had lit up that spot which I had always seen in deep shadow, revealing its secret.  After gazing steadily for some time I made out a crow’s nest in the dwarf pine top and the vague black forms of three young fully fledged crows sitting or standing in it.  The middle bird had the shining crimson eyes; but in a few moments the illusory colour was gone and the eyes were black.