OF all the old proverbs that are open to argument, few offer more material for criticism than that which has it that a good name is more easily lost than won; and if ever a living creature served to illustrate the converse to the proverbial dog with a bad name, that creature is the companionable little bird that we peculiarly associate with Christmas. Traditionally, the robin is a gentle little fellow of pious associations and with a tender fancy for covering the unburied dead with leaves; but in real life he is a little fire-eater, always ready to pick a quarrel with his less pugnacious neighbours. Yet so persistently does his good name cling, that, while ever ready to condemn the aggressive sparrow for the same fault, all of us have a good word for the robin, and in few of our wild birds are character and reputation so divergent.  
Surely, however, the most interesting aspect of this familiar bird is its tameness, not to say attachment to ourselves, and so marked is its complete absence of fear that it is a wild bird in name only, and indeed[138] few cage birds are ever so bold as to perch on the gardener's spade on the look-out for the worms as he turns them up from the damp soil. The robin might, in fact, furnish the text of a lay-sermon on the fruits of kindness to animals, and those dialectical people who ask whether we are kind to the robin because it trusts us, or whether, on the other hand, it trusts us because we are kind to it, ask a foolish question that raises a wholly unnecessary confusion between cause and effect. It is a question that those, at any rate, who have seen the bird in countries where it is treated differently will have no difficulty whatever in answering. Broadly speaking, the redbreast has the best time of it in northern lands. This tolerance has not, as has been suggested, any connection with Protestantism, for such a distinction would exclude the greater part of Ireland, where, as it happens, the bird is as safe from persecution as in Britain, since the superstitious peasants firmly believe that anyone killing a "spiddog" will be punished by a lump growing on the palm of his hand. The untoward fate of the robin in Latin countries[139] bordering the Mediterranean has nothing to do with religion, but is merely the result of a pernicious habit of killing all manner of small birds for the table. The sight of rows of dead robins laid out on poulterers' stalls in the markets of Italy and southern France inspires such righteous indignation in British tourists as to make them forget for the moment that larks are exposed in the same way in Bond Street and at Leadenhall. In Italy and Provence, taught by sad experience the robin is as shy as any other small bird. It has learnt its lesson like the robins in the north, but the lesson is different. The most friendly robin I ever remember meeting with, out of England was in a garden attached to a café in Trebizond, where, hopping round my chair and picking up crumbs, it made me feel curiously at home. Similar treatment of other wild birds would in time produce the same result, and even the suspicious starling and stand-off rook might be taught to forget their fear of us. The robin, feeding less on fruit and grain than on worms and insects, has not made an enemy of the farmer or gardener. The common, too common, sparrow,[140] is another fearless neighbour, but its freedom from persecution, of late somewhat threatened by Sparrow Clubs, is due less to affection than to the futility of making any impression on such hordes as infest our streets.
 
No act of the robin's more forcibly illustrates its trust in man than the manner in which, at a season when all animals are abnormally shy and suspicious, it makes its nest not only near our dwellings, but actually in many cases under the same roof as ourselves. Letterboxes, flowerpots, old boots, and bookshelves have all done duty, and I even remember a pair of robins, many years ago in Kent, bringing up two broods in an old rat trap which, fortunately too rusty to act, was still set and baited with a withered piece of bacon. Pages might be filled with the mere enumeration of curious and eccentric nesting sites chosen by this fearless bird, but a single proof of its indifference to the presence of man during the time of incubation may be cited from the MS. notebooks of the second Earl of Malmesbury, which I have read in the library at Heron Court. It seems that, while the east wing of that[141] pleasant mansion was being built, a pair of robins, having successfully brought up............