31 JULY 1993, Page 10

One hundred years ago

Mr. Digby Pigott, writing to the Times of Thursday, gives a charming idyll of the lake in St. James's Park. On the 8th of this month a dabchick's nest, "made fast to the dipping boughs of a black- poplar," broke from its moorings and drifted into the open. "The hen-bird, who was sitting at the time of the acci- dent, stuck bravely to her eggs, and in a twelve-days' voyage, during which her mate has been seldom out of her sight, has crossed and recrossed from the peninsula to the mainland." Her con- stancy was rewarded, and on Wednes- day afternoon "she floated safe in port with two newly hatched balls of down on her back, within a yard or two of the spot where her raft was first built."

The Spectator 29 July 1893