by the way, the only gregarious landbird now found in New Zealand. The flock blown away from the Australian coast may well have numbered a hundred birds or more, so that after allowing for casualties there would still be enough survivors to form the nucleus of a thriving community. The new conditions, too, would suit the birds admirably. In Australia they swing their delicate horse-hair interwoven hammocks from the twigs of the titree that grows in dense clumps in the sandhills on the coast: in New Zealand they found the manuka, a member of the same genus (Melaleuca), and other kindred shrubs.

The marvellous fashion in which it has spread throughout New Zealand is a characteristic that it shares with the birds imported into the Dominion by human agency: the Blackbird and Thrush, to take the best-known examples. To-day if one were to ask a boy in the streets of any town from Invercargill to Auckland what were the six commonest New Zealand birds, he would be pretty sure to name the Blight-bird, and to fill up the half-dozen with birds that sixty years ago were unknown anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Blight-bird's progress northward from the southern extremity of New Zealand was amazingly rapid. In the year 1856 they appeared successively in Otago, Canterbury, and later in Nelson, where Cook's Strait, which separates the two islands, barred their course. But that turbulent sea-way, where so many a good ship-the hapless Penguin being the last-has piled her bones on the gray rocks, presented no lasting obstacle to the advance-guard of little invaders hurrying North into warmer, more home-like weather from the bleak winter of the South. First to see them in the North Island was a native mailman at Waikanae, forty miles from Wellington, and almost si

multaneously flocks appeared in the hedges and suburban gardens of the windy capital itself, earning immediate gratitude from the inhabitants for the good work they did in ridding the apple-trees of the dreaded American blight (Schizoneura lanigera). All through that winter they stayed in the neighborhood of Wellington. But when September brought the first warm days of the Antipodean spring the visitors disappeared, suddenly as they came, re-crossing the strait to the South Island to breed. They were not seen again on the North Island for two years.

Then in 1858 they crossed

in greater numbers than before, returning again at the end of the winter. In 1862 it appears to have occurred to them that an annual migration was perhaps unnecessary, for they remained to nest in the environs of Wellington. Rapid, indeed, was their northward progress from that time. Napier saw the first of them in 1862, the Upper Wanganui in 1863, the Waikato in 1864, and in 1865 they reached the Queen City of the Northern Island, that city

"Last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite,

apart."

But the unchanging season which smiles on Auckland only attracted the birds farther north, till in 1867 the natives of the Bay of Islands made the personal acquaintance of the Tauhou. -not quite to the advantage of the latter, as we shall see,-and the North Cape, the John o' Groats of a Southern Scotland, was reached in 1868. Why they should have continued to move northward beyond the limits of New Zealand is hard to say, but that they did so is certain. It may have been that they found the climate of the Islands on the whole more rigorous than that of Australia, and that instinct led them to try to regain what they had lost.

"On my passage from Tahiti to Auckland, per brig Rita," wrote at the same time а relative of my own,-Mr. George Owen,-"about 300 miles north of the North Cape of New Zealand, I saw one morning several little birds flying about the ship. From their twittering, and the manner of flying, I concluded that they were land-birds, and they were easily caught. They were of a brownish-gray and yellowish color, with a little white mark round the eye. I saw several pass over the ship during the day, travelling northwards. I arrived in Auckland a few days afterwards on the 20th of May, when the so-called Blight-birds appeared here in such numbers, and I at once recognized them as the same birds."

The Blight-birds were probably there on their way to the Kermadec Group of Islands, where they are now very common. Up to the present time they have not attempted to cover the long ocean-stretch that lies between these islands and Tonga, so that we may regard this species as having reached its northernmost limit.

About the size of a White-throat, the Blight-bird has its head and upper part of the tail bright greenish-olive, back dark gray, throat yellowish, lower parts white verging into chestnut on the flanks. But the characteristic mark that makes it the best-known small bird not only in New Zealand but in Australia, whose inhabitants are not accustomed to take much notice of small birds, or indeed of anything else that has not an obvious cash value, is the ring of white feathers round the eye. This gives the local names of White-eye, Silver-eye, and Ring-eye: its other Australian name of Cherrypicker, due, we may suppose, to the pessimistic point of view of the Australian settlers, just as the name "Blight-bird" records the gratitude of the New Zealanders who so christened it on its arrival among them.

On the continent of Australia these

birds move about in rather smaller companies than one sees in New Zealand. When they are flying-they have a higher flight than most small birdsthey utter a rapid twittering note, which becomes plaintive in character when the flock has settled on a tree to feed. There is, too, an exquisitely sweet song which often goes unnoticed, so subdued are its strains.

"Sometimes, passing under a Pepper-tree, or a Pittosporum, in which the birds were feeding," says an Australian relative, "I have caught the sweet sounds, and stopping, have looked up to see on a horizontal bough a tiny green pair pressed close together like love-birds, one bird pouring forth the most delightful melody as if for the ear of the partner alone. Strange to say, you may hear this song in autumn or winter as well as in the breeding season; and yet one is lucky to hear it more than once in a day, however many of the birds there may be in the locality. My own experience is that it is most frequently to be heard late in the afternoon. One curious habit of this Zosterops, which it shares with the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo and other Antipodean species, is that of placing sentinels to warn the feeding flock of approaching danger. These outposts perch on the topmost twigs of the tree in which the others are feeding, or else in a neighboring tree; and when they see you coming they fly off with shrill twittering, the rest following, not always all together, but each as he can tear himself from the fruit or insect he has been discussing; and then the flock re-forms farther on. Sometimes, however, whether for lack of organization or because the sentries are not always proof against temptation, no warning is given; and then nothing short of a great noise will frighten them out of the tree. When I was a child, at Heidelberg near Melbourne, I used to watch a boy shooting these birds with a catapult, or 'shanghai' as it is called in Victoria. He would drag a long cane chair beneath an elder-tree which they frequented, and then, lying in the chair, would shoot up with tiny shot pellets.

I shall never forget how the berries used to drop from the green leaves overhead as the birds sucked them dry, and how ever and anon a bird too would fall, and then I was divided between childish pity at the sight of the beautiful little green bird lying there dead, and admiration for the excellent marksmanship of my big friend."

As in the case of all birds that are partly frugivorous, there has been much discussion about the Blight-bird's relative utility or harmfulness to man. When it first came to Wellington it was hailed as a benefactor, for it cleared many an orchard and garden of the woolly blight. It was rather fortunate for the birds that they first manifested their activities in this direction and did not stay in Wellington for the fruit season: they went away with an excellent reputation and a name which has been of considerable protective value to them ever since. For other reasons, too, it was welcome. It formed a pleasing addition to the birds of the New Zealand bush, none too many at any time, and it did not shun civilization as do nearly all the indigenous birds. Later, however, orchardists came to regard it as a nuisance, so great were its ravages among the softer fruits. And certainly in its own country it had always been without honor, the Australian fruitgrower never treating the "Cherrypicker" as anything but a pest.

Truth as usual lies somewhere midway, and opinion both in the Commonwealth and in the Dominion is inclining to the view that it may do more good than harm; so much must be confessed, that in spring and summer the Zosterops does work havoc among small fruits, and in autumn one may see scores of late apples rendered unmarketable by the green-winged scamps. It is interesting to watch a Zosterops operating on a pear. Working a hole in from the side with its sharp little bill, it finally gets right

inside the fruit and feeds to its heart's content from that position until the pear hangs a mere shell on the branch, or falls to the ground completely "ringbarked," and then often enough the greedly little bird will follow it down to the ground and finish it there. But when there is no fruit on the trees the bird is a veritable scourge to the aphis and other noxious insects, and the casemoth that attacks forest timber may well fear for its larvæ when a flock of Blight-birds descends upon the tree. During the autumn and winter months of the Antipodes, say from April to August, numbers of them come into the town gardens and eat off vast quantities of aphides from chrysanthemums and rose-bushes. They also like the full-grown "pear slug," and pick from the trees, or the ground beneath, numbers of codlin moth grubs and similar fruit-pests.

A man I know of near Wellington had a lot of apple-trees which had suffered very much from the depredations of Blackbirds, Thrushes, and Zosterops. One year, in despair at the loss of nearly all his fruit, he put up posts round the outside of the plot and covered the whole of the trees with wire netting, on the top as well as at the sides. The plan worked admirably so far as the birds were concerned, of course: but he had reckoned without the hosts of the codlin moth. These seized the opportunity afforded by the absence of their natural foes, and when the orchardist picked his apples, a heavy crop, next season, every single one was found riddled with the ugly tubular tracks of the detested grub. In the summer of the succeeding year he tried leaving the door open, but the Blight-birds seemed to suspect a trap, and none would enter. So he took down his wire-work.

Here it may be mentioned that settlers often protect their orchards from this moth by planting the "codlin-moth

plant" near the fruit-trees. It is a curious carnivorous plant, a creeper with deep flowers into which the moth, probing in search of nectar, is presently held close prisoner and, later, devoured at a season of the year when she has not yet laid her eggs.

The Zosterops is particularly fond of grapes. A Victorian vigneron found that one or two Butcher-birds (Cractious), kept in the vineyard with their wings cut, effectually terrified the Zosterops and other small birds away from the bunches. There is a certain fitness of this employment of Nature's own police, but the system has not been tried in New Zealand, where there is no bird with quite such an alarming voice as the Butcher-bird, which might be called in.

Neither in Victoria nor in New Zealand is the Zosterops protected by law. Indeed, there was at one time almost a crusade against these birds in New Zealand; but this is not likely to be repeated: public opinion, being now under the guidance of men who have studied their economic value, is veering round in favor of these and many other birds very much as it has done in England. Curiously enough, the Blight-bird in New Zealand has suffered far more from the Maoris, whom it never troubled in the least, than from the white settlers. It had the misfortune to earn an immediate reputation as a hors-d'œuvre at formal feasts. The Bay of Plenty natives had a singular way of catching it. Selecting a tree where the "Tauhous" were wont to congregate, the man would clear a space among the boughs, put up several horizontal

Blackwood's Magazine.

perches, and then sit beneath them with a stick in his hand, imitating the while the call-note of the birds. Presently a flock would come swarming into the tree and fill the perches; then, suddenly switching his stick along the perches from end to end, the hunter would knock down dozens of the little birds at a time, to be gathered up by a boy stationed under the tree. A couple of Uriwera boys have been seen with a basket containing as many as 600 birds killed in this manner. The subsequent preparation was simple; they were plucked and preserved in fat as a winter food. It is a small bird. and the Maoris found no difficulty in eating head, bones and all.

A further, if slighter, misfortune which the Blight-bird meets with in New Zealand is the patronage of the Shining Cuckoo. This bird, one of the few regular immigrants from Northern Australia to New Zealand (where it breeds), lays an egg which, though larger and of a deeper blue-green than the beautiful hedge-sparrow-like egg of the Blight-bird, still bears a considerable resemblance to the latter. There is a closely allied cuckoo in the southeast of Australia, the Narrow-billed Bronze Cuckoo: but it lays a redspotted egg that would look startlingly conspicuous in the nest of the Blightbird, which it therefore usually avoids in favor of those of rarer species. The fact that its congener seeks out the Blight-bird's nest in preference to those of indigenous New Zealand species seems to be rather a good example of protective mimicry by approximate coloration.

J. A. Owen.

The last stroke of noon had sounded, the school door was flung open, and the children poured out, jostling one another in their eagerness to escape as quickly as possible. But instead of dispersing rapidly and going home to dinner, as was their custom, they kept pausing, gathering into groups and holding whispered conversations.

La Blanchotte's son, Simon, had that morning come to school for the first time.

They had all heard talk of la Blanchotte at home; and although she was well enough received in public, the mothers were in the habit of mentioning her name with a kind of contempt uous pity, which made its impression on the children without their understanding its reason.

As for Simon, they did not know him, for he never came out to join their play in the village streets or by the riverside. Thus they had no particular liking for him, and it was with a measure of joy, mingled with considerable surprise, that they had heard certain words which they kept repeating from one to the other. The words had been said by a boy of fourteen or fifteen, whose sly winks indicated that he had known all about it for a long time; he had said: "Oh, Simon!-well -you know, he hasn't got a father."

Simon in turn appeared at the school door. He was a child of seven or eight years, very pale, very neat, of appearance so timid as almost to seem awkward.

He was turning towards his mother's house, when the groups of his schoolmates gathered about him little by little, till in the end he was completely surrounded. They had never ceased to whisper, and they looked on him with the cruel and pitiless eyes of children who meditate an evil stroke.

There Simon stood, planted in the middle of them, surprised and embarrassed, not understanding what they wanted with him. But the boy who had brought the news, puffed up by the success he had already obtained, demanded: "Hallo, youngster, what's your name?"

"Simon," came the reply.

"Simon what?" rejoined the other. "Simon," repeated the child in confusion.

"Simon," cried the other, "Simonthat's no name-it must be Simon something."

And the child, on the verge of tears, replied for the third time, "My name is Simon."

The urchins around him began to laugh. The triumphant questioner raised his voice: "There, you see, he hasn't got a father."

There was a momentary silence. The children were stupefied by this extraordinary thing-a boy without a fathermonstrous! impossible! They looked askance at him as an unnatural being; and they felt arising within them that hitherto unexplained despite which their mothers displayed towards la Blanchotte.

Simon was resting against a tree to keep himself from falling. He was motionless, as though overwhelmed by a disaster beyond repair. He wished to clear his position; but he knew not what to reply, or how to disprove the horrible charge that he had no father. Finally, beside himself he cried out impulsively, "Yes, I have one."

"Where is he?" asked the tormentor.

Simon could not answer: he did not know. The others, wild with glee, burst out laughing. They were children of the fields, with much of the wild beast in their nature; they were possessed by that same spirit which