Anecdotal Evidence: `As If It Had Made Up Its Mind to Stay'

Anecdotal Evidence: `As If It Had Made Up Its Mind to Stay'
Excerpt:

By repute, the robin is the gentlest of birds, an honorary dove, at least to humans, though I’ve watched them pull meters of earthworm from the lawn. Between 1824 and 1826, John Clare composed a series of “Natural History Letters” (The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, edited by Margaret Grainger, 1983) to his friend James Augustus Hessey. Among them is a lengthy description of a robin he befriended as a boy growing up in Helpston:

“…in winter it will venture into the house for food & become as tame as a chicken—we had one that usd [sic] to come in at a broken pane in the window three winters together I always knew it to be our old visitor by a white scar on one of the wings [del. which might have been an old wound made by some cat] it grew so tame that it would perch on ones [sic] finger & take the crumbs out of the hand…it would never stay in the house at night tho it would attempt to perch on the chair spindles & clean its bill & ruffles its feather & put its head under its wing as if it had made up its mind to stay”...