We live so closely and familiarly with nature on the isolated hilltop, where my cottage is perched, that we often behold from our own drawing-room windows pretty rural sights, which seem intensely strange to more town-bred visitors. A little while since, for example, I was amused at reading in an evening newspaper a lament by a really well-informed and observant naturalist on the difficulty of actually seeing the night-jar, or fern-owl, alight upon a tree, and stand, as is his wont, lengthwise, not transversely to the branch that bears him. Now, from our little bay lattice that doubting Thomas might see the weird bird nightly, not twenty yards off, the whole summer through, crooning its passionate song, full in view of our house, from a gnarled old fir-tree. So again this morning, at breakfast, we raised our eyes from the buttered eggs and coffee, and they fell at once on a big green woodpecker, creeping upward, after his fashion, along a russet-brown pine-trunk, not fifteen feet from the place at table where we were quietly sitting. One could make out with the naked eye the dark olive-green of his back, relieved by the brilliant crimson patch on his gleaming crown. For several minutes he stood there, clambering slowly up the tree, though we rose from our seats and approached quite close to the open window to examine him. When he turned his head, and listened intently after his tapping, with that characteristic air of philosophic inquiry which marks his species, the paler green of his under parts flashed for a second upon us; and when at last, having satisfied himself there was nothing astir under the bark of the stunted pine, he flew away to the next clump, we caught the glint of his wings and the red cap on his head in motion through the air with extraordinary distinctness.

The yaffle, as we call our red-headed friend in these parts, is one of the largest and handsomest of our woodland wild birds. About a foot in length, by the actual measurement, “from the end of his beak to the tip of his tail,” he hardly impresses one at first sight with a sense of his full size, because of his extreme concinnity and neatness of plumage. A practical bird, he is built rather for use than for vain gaudy display; for, though his colour is fine, and evidently produced by many ages of ?sthetic selection, he yet sedulously avoids all crests and top-knots, all bunches and bundles of decorative feathers protruding from his body, which would interfere with his solid and business-like pursuit of wood-burrowing insects. How well-built and how cunningly evolved he is, after all, for his special purpose! His feet are so divided into opposite pairs of toes—one couple pointing forward and the other backward—that he can easily climb even the smooth-barked beech-tree, by digging his sharp claws into any chance inequality in its level surface. He alights head upward, and moves on a perpendicular plane as surely and mysteriously as a lizard. Nothing seems to puzzle him; the straightest trunk becomes as a drawin............