Page:White - The natural history of Selborne, and the naturalist's calendar, 1879.djvu/95

Rh about three weeks they are all gone. I shall be very curious to remark whether they will call on us at their return in the spring, as they did last year.

I want to be better informed with regard to ichthyology. If fortune had settled me near the seaside, or near some great river, my natural propensity would soon have urged me to have made myself acquainted with their productions: but as I have lived mostly in inland parts, and in an upland district, my knowledge of fishes extends little farther than to those common sorts which our brooks and lakes produce.

I am, etc.

.

$e1$ At Craigyrhiw, a limestone cliff near Oswestry, on the Welsh border, where the jackdaws bred by the thousand, numbers of them made their nests in the rabbit holes at the foot of the rocks. I often used to find a stock-dove's nest in a rabbit hole there too. We would sit and watch them from a crag, until we saw a bird leave or enter. On the Norfolk warrens, too, stock-doves breed in the rabbit holes.

  LETTER XXII.

, Jan. 2nd, 1769.

, As to the peculiarity of jackdaws building with us under the ground in rabbit-burrows, you have, in part, hit upon the reason; for, in reality, there are hardly any towers or steeples in all this county. And perhaps, Norfolk excepted, Hampshire and Sussex are as meanly furnished with churches as almost any counties in the kingdom. We have many livings of two or three hundred pounds a year, whose houses of worship make little better appearance than dovecots. When I first saw Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire, and the fens of Lincolnshire, I was amazed at the number of spires which presented themselves in every point of view. As an admirer of prospects, I have