where one can sit quietly for very long, without a robin stealing softly out and, as it were, sliding himself into the landscape. Then—however bleak or chill it may be—his presence seems to bring home comforts with it. But this is only when one is near home and home comforts—not when one is far, far away from them. I remember in the great pineforests of Norway—so lovely yet so stern in their loveliness—the robin seemed to have lost all his character. He did not suggest home and all its pleasures when home was no longer near. It was not (or perhaps it was) that by suggestion he made these seem farther off, but that his character seemed gone. Surely, things are to us as a part of what they move in with us, and, out of this, seem changed and to be something else.
I am not quite sure if the following represents any change of habits in regard to food, induced by the presence of a foreign tree, in any of the three birds that it concerns. I have occasionally watched the great-tit in our own fir-plantations, but have not yet seen him attacking the cones, though the coal-tit, as I believe, does so. For the greenfinch I can only say that I should not have thought it of him, nor is he often to be seen in such places. The nut-hatch is not common where I live.
"Standing this Christmas Eve under a large exotic conifer on the lawn of the garden here in Gloucestershire, I became aware that various birds were busy amongst its branches, and I kept hearing a curious grating noise with a strong vibration in it, which seemed to be made by them with the beak upon the large fir-cones, but as the branches were very close
