"This was procured," he would say, "by my dear old gillie Angus out of the bird's very nest.

There was just the single egg.

The species," he added, tenderly handling the delicate, porcelain-like oval in his brown hand covered with very fine, blackish hairs, "is now extinct." He was, in fact, a true bird-lover, strongly condemning cockneys, or rough, ignorant persons who, with no collections of their own, wantonly destroyed kingfishers, or scarce birds of any sort, out of pure stupidity.

"I would have them flogged," he would say, for he believed that no such bird should be killed except on commission, and for choice--barring such extreme cases as that Dartford Warbler--in some foreign country or remoter part of the British Isles.

It was indeed illustrative of Mr.Pendyce's character and whole point of view that whenever a rare, winged stranger appeared on his own estate it was talked of as an event, and preserved alive with the greatest care, in the hope that it might breed and be handed down with the property; but if it were personally known to belong to Mr.Fuller or Lord Quarryman, whose estates abutted on Worsted Skeynes, and there was grave and imminent danger of its going back, it was promptly shot and stuffed, that it might not be lost to posterity.