London Birds And other Sketches - 1902 - PREFACE - AS a man gets on in life, and his responsibilities, and with them his anxieties, increase-as, except in the case of the favoured few, they must do until he is far enough down the hill to shift some of them on to younger and stronger shoulders-nothing is more to be dreaded than the narrowing effects of long habit. If he has nothing to carry his thoughts out, they will centre on himself and his real or imaginary troubles. It is not work so much as worry that breaks a man down. In Endymion, when the heros father found money difficulties gathering round him, and his political hopes failed at what had seemed the very moment of realisation, he found refuge, writes the author, in suicide, as many do, from want of imagination. The power which could convey Lord Beaconsfield himself, at the time of a crushing defeat, back to the clipped yew hedges and formal terraces of the Bradenham of his boyhood, and enable him there to forget himself in the hopes and fears of beings of his own creation, is a gift of the gods to the few. The best substitute, for less gifted mortals, is the possession of a Hobby. It does not matter much what it is - railway-ticket collecting may do as well for some people as astronomy for others-if only strong enough, when called upon, to jump the ring-fence which hedges the owner in with his own immediate personal concerns. This little book has no pretence to be anything more than a collection of notes made, at different times and in varying surroundings, from the back of a favourite Hobby-one that has this special recommendation, that, when once mounted, it is to the most beautiful spots that it oftenest carries the rider to thick grove and tangled stream to moor, meadow, forest, and marsh to sea-cliffs haunted by myriads of sea-fowl to island-studded lakes and lonely mountains. If by any lucky chance anything in it should be the means of awakening in a young reader a first interest in bird or insect, it mill not be until his hair is silvering that he will realise the extent of his debt to the writer. It is suggestive that f itt, when Premier of a Governme t in a minority in the House of Commons, and-as his private correspondence shows-worried about his mothers moneymatters, bought Holmood because he had bird-nested there as a boy. The chapters on London Birds have, since the publication of the second edition, been revised and considerably enlarged by the addition of letters addressed at intervals to The Times, and two new chapters are added. In one of these, on the Haunts of the Shearwater, the greater part of which was published as an article in BEackwoods Magazine, entitled A Poor Relation of the Albat, rossYnyo w reprinted with the permission of the proprietors, another letter to The Times has been embodied, describing the two Skelligs. The chapters on the Farnes and Shetland Isles, the Norfollr Broads, s Dutch nesting-place of the Avocet, and the concluding chapter on Bird Life, are reprinted, also by permission, very kindly given, from the Contempora y Review. The frontispiece is from a sketch by Alr. Archibald Thorburn of the Cormorants rock, a winter scene in St. Jamess Park. The other full-page pictures are from photographs of birds nests taken and kindly lent by Alr. H. C. Monro, C. B., Miss Ethel Blonro, and Lieut.-Colonel TV. H. Duthie. The Hands of the Aye-Aye are from a picture by the late Mr. Wolf, published in the P oceedi lgs of the IZoyal Zoological Society. T. D. P. LOSDON O , ct. 1902. C O N T E N T S CHAPTER I L o s o sB IRDS ...