ROOKS IN LONDON.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] Sin,—In the current number of the Edinburgh Review there- is a charming article on "The Birds of London," in which the following passage occurs :—" We come, then, to the last existing rookery in London, which is also one of the oldest.- Within sound of the roar of Holborn, in the gardens of Gray's Inn, the rooks still build Most of Bacon's elms are now gone, and instead of thirty or forty nests, as there used to be twenty years ago, there are only three to be seen, each one solitary, in the highest tops of three plane-trees. Next spring the ornithologist will make an anxious pilgrimage to the spot, hoping that he may not find the Gray's Inn rookery also deserted." Let me hasten to reassure the writer and his friends on a matter of such importance. From my window, as I write, I can count twelve nests, and the gardener informs me there are at least twenty-three in the garden. The birds- seem at this time exceedingly busy and contented, while the Elijahs of Gray's Inn turn the tables on their sooty friends by feeding them copiously with bread and meat, flung from windows, and with even more costly and artificial forms of diet. We deprecate a suspicion of the permanence of these institutions. The rooks are an institution here, which may last with their Inn to the end of all things. "Si eos volo manere donee veniam, quid ad te?"----I am, Sir, &c., G. B.
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