Ch. 16: Old Wiltshire Days - Page 2

toward the stranger within its gates
as to make him remember it with pleasure and gratitude.

What a quiet little place Hindon has become, after its old noisy period,
the following little bird story will show. For several weeks during the
spring and summer of 1909 my home was at the Lamb Inn, a famous
posting-house of the great old days, and we had three pairs of
birds--throstle, pied wagtail, and flycatcher--breeding in the ivy
covering the wall facing the village street, just over my window. I
watched them when building, incubating, feeding their young, and
bringing their young off. The villagers, too, were interested in the
sight, and sometimes a dozen or more men and boys would gather and stand
for half an hour watching the birds flying in and out of their nests
when feeding their young. The last to come off were the flycatchers, on
18th June. It was on the morning of the day I left, and one of the
little things flitted into the room where I was having my breakfast. I
succeeded in capturing it before the cats found out, and put it back on
the ivy. There were three young birds; I had watched them from the time
they hatched, and when I returned a fortnight later, there were the
three, still being fed by their parents in the trees and on the roof,
their favourite perching-place being on the swinging sign of the "Lamb."
Whenever an old bird darted at and captured a fly the three young would
flutter round it like three butterflies to get the fly. This continued
until 18th July, after which date I could not detect their feeding the
young, although the hunger-call was occasionally heard.

If the flycatcher takes a month to teach its young to catch their own
flies, it is not strange that it breeds but once in the year. It is a
delicate art the bird practises and takes long to learn, but how
different with the martin, which dismisses its young in a few days and
begins breeding again, even to the third time!

These three broods over my window were not the only ones in the place;
there were at least twenty other pairs in the garden and outhouses of
the inn--sparrows, thrushes, blackbirds, dunnocks, wrens, starlings, and
swallows. Yet the inn was in the very centre of the village, and being
an inn was the most frequented and noisiest spot.

To return to my old friend of eighty-nine. He was but a small boy,
attending the Hindon school, when the rioters appeared on the scene, and
he watched their entry from the schoolhouse window. It was market-day,
and the market was stopped by the invaders, and the agricultural
machines brought for sale and exhibition were broken up. The picture
that remains in his mind is of a great excited crowd in which men and
cattle and sheep were mixed together in the