Shanghai, April 26.—It is always a pleasure to come back to Shanghai, however one may feel about a dirty city when reviewing it mentally on a gloriously. clean sea beach: burglars, bandits, bombers, brokers and bankers may be doing their worst... but the birds in my garden sing me a welcome, and the willows and poplars dressed in viv green remind me that the young Magpies are already out of their nests. Out in the country the crops have grown waist-high... dandelion and blue-eyed Speedwell brighten every little patch of fallow: in parks and gardens pseudo-acactas are a mass of white blossoms, while horse-chestnuts have put a match to their flowering candelabra: horsey men are reading race-books and the first white "bags" will soon be lining up against in fact, while I can say "summer en in," I cannot add "loud sings because it is not yet the first of May. Thinking thus, I strolled out into the Hungjao area this morning looking for some early snipe, and was quickly rewarded vith the sight of a large fat "Swinhoe" which might well have been mistaken for a Woodcock: following up the trail among the smaller creeks, I soon walked up a smaller snipe which refused to act according to the manner of his kind: instead of rising swiftly and disappearing with a raucous "bleat" this bird merely hopped (after the fashion of airmen) over a narrow creek and parked itself behind a few scanty reeds within five yards of me: none of my quiet movements disturbed it; I focused my field-glasses to short range and studied every feather while the bird stayed still as if it were asleep. I realized quickly that this was a male Painted Snipe... the Rostratula benghalensis so rarely seen in these parts: to get the bird to fly (so that I could better see its under parts) I had actually to wave my arms and say "Boo"—or whatever it is the more timid are unable to say to a Goose. Then, and then only, did this bird rise... with dangling legs, like a Grebe or Rail—thus finally proving its identity-—zs-w.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.