Rus IN URBE.
Yet greater marvels were reported from Hampstead. London is indeed a marvellous place for birds. So wrote Mr. Julian Huxley, who is one of our best observers, in a letter to the Times. Within a few hours of reading his strange example of this general truth, I came upon some yet more startling illustrations, or so it seems to me. Mr. Huxley saw a heron (which I have seen in Battersea), thought he heard a raven, and was very sure he saw a hawk large enough to be a Peregrine Falcon. This was in Hampstead, which has an attraction for wild mammals as well as birds. Did it not recently harbour that shy and in many counties very rare animal, the badger ? But there still exists over Hampstead a certain appearance of the real country, even though roads and urban noises and sights encircle it and obtrude. No one can allege such rural qualities of the spot in East London where other rarer birds were observed almost simultaneously with the heron, large hawk and crow at Hampstead.
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