before March-what time the British species (which swarms here all winter) departs for the North. It then announces its arrival with a pretty trill, not unlike the opening bars of a nightingale, but breaking off suddenly in the midst of the note. A similar anachronous colony occupied the carobtrees outside our old shooting-lodge in Doñana, and used to awaken us each winter's dawn with musical whistles, besides croaking like frogs and imitating to perfection the notes of curlew and stone-plover, peewits, wigeon, and other wildfowl. This is hardly the place to catalogue all our multitudinous neighbours, charming and other. There would need to be specified snakes of sundry sorts and sizes up to 6 feet long— none known to be venomous except the common adder. We have also scorpions, tarantulas, and millepedes that sting: myriapods, wolf-spiders, geckos, and lizards that do not, though some of the latter reach a yard in length. The larger reptiles, however, are not in much evidence during winter: though a regiment of rhinoceros beetles may cause a flutter in the dovecots. Certain spiritual neighbours must not be entirely omitted, though at some risk of sacrificing a hard-won reputation for veracity for there are Ghosts which also haunt our Castle. It may be that they are the Lost Souls of archaic Roman centurions or sergeant-majors condemned to this penance for using in life unduly explosive language? The Author has no use for the supernatural; yet when these shadows flicker and flit across our walls, they certainly represent no substance that can be captured in a butterfly-net! "Neither substance quite nor shadow, Haunting lonely moor or meadow, Riding on the whirlwind's wing." SIR WALTER SCOTT. Immediately below our "hanging balcony," a narrow rockshelf in the crag, overgrown with cactus and aloe, affords favourite hunting-ground to many of the warbler-tribe, conspicuous among these being the blackstart (Ruticilla titys) |