THE MURDERED BITTERN.
What astonishing lengths of time country memories pre- serve ! I was in the depths of the Cambridgeshire Fens last wcelr, and heard a resident—he was round about four score years, I suppose—give from his personal memory the names of the people who had killed the last of the bitterns on a particular piece of marsh in the year 1868. A nesting pair were shot in that summer and no bittern seen or heard again for fifty odd years. The crime is resented to this day, and the names of the culprits will be preserved in local tradition for many years yet. Shakespeare, who was a countryman born and bred, knew well how " the evil that men do lives after them." Though preservation and the spirit of the sanctuary grow steadily (and have restored the bitterns) such crimes are not extinct. In the very district notorious for the crime of 1868, a Montagu Harries, that rare and splendid hawk, was recently shot almost in the breeding season.
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