Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/31

Rh however, had different tastes, and had selected bleached rabbit-bones for an adornment.

The largest members of the fauna are a small party of very wild goats, the male being a magnificent animal with huge horns; how long they have been there I do not know, but they are never milked. for on the steep cliffs it would be difficult to catch them. Giraldus Cambrensis, writing more than 700 years ago, tells of another mammal. "There is a small island, almost adjoining Anglesey, which is inhabited by hermits, living by manual labour and serving God. It is remarkable that when, by the influence of human passions, any discord arises among theta, all their provisions are devoured and infested by a species of small mice, with which the island abounds; and when the discord ceases, they are no longer molested." Perhaps biologists never quarrel! Perhaps the absence of human inhabitants accounts for the extinction of these murine checks to immorality; at any rate, we are still looking for the "species of small mice."