It isn’t often a man can stand at his own drawing-room window and be the interested spectator at a combat of wild beasts, where one antagonist not only conquers, but also fairly devours the other! Yet such Roman sport I have just this moment been unlucky enough to witness. Unlucky enough, I say, because the victor did not first kill and then eat his victim, as any combatant with a spark of chivalry in his nature would have done, but slowly chewed him up alive before my eyes, with no more consideration for the feelings of the vanquished than if the unfortunate creature had been a vegetable. I don’t mean to pretend it was tiger versus cobra. The assailant was a thrush, the defender an earthworm. Now, thrushes, we all know, are sweet songsters when they have dined. Has not George Meredith hymned them, as Shelley the skylark? But if you want to see the poetry taken clean out of a thrush, just watch him as he catches and devours an earthworm! The poor unsuspicious annelid, feeling the joy of spring stir in his sluggish veins, comes to the surface for a moment in search of those fallen leaves which form the staple of his blameless vegetarian diet. No mole shakes the earth; the sod is fresh and moist; here seems a propitious moment for an above-ground excursion. So the earthworm pokes out his head and peers around him inquiringly; peers, I venture to say, blind beast though he be, because his method of feeling his way and exploring by touch is so human and inquisitive. But embodied Fate is on the watch, silent, keen-eyed, immovable; and no sooner does that slimy soul poke his nose above the ground than the thrush is upon him, quick and deadly as lightning. In one second the creature feels himself seized by one of his scaly rings, held fast in an iron vice, and slowly chewed piecemeal with the utmost deliberation. He wriggles and squirms, but all in vain; the thrush munches calmly on, now with this side of his bill, now that, drawing the worm ring by ring from the soil to which he desperately clings, and enjoying him as he goes with most evident gusto.

Both are intruders here. When first we came to our hilltop there were no thrushes and no earthworms, no house-martins and no sparrows. But the building of one simple red-tiled cottage set up endless changes in the fauna and flora. A whole revolution was inaugurated over a realm of three acres. The house-martins were the first to come; they settled in before us. Ancestral instinct has taught them to know well that where a house is built there will be eaves to nest under, and people will inhabit it, who throw about meat and fruit, which attract the flies; and flies are the natural diet of house-martins. The sparrows came next; but the thrushes loitered longer. And the manner of their coming was after this fashion—

The powers that be............