The Fox and the Fleas

Abstract

MANY years ago a few friends were chatting in Kirkby Lonsdale Vicarage, and one of us remarked that almost everybody had within his own knowledge some story that he could not expect his friends to believe. The vicar (Henry Ware, afterwards Bishop of Barrow) told us his story. He was coming out of the vicarage with Archdeacon Evans and the parish clerk, when they saw in the lime avenue in front of them a chaffinch fluttering up and down with the tip of its wing attached to one of the long pendulous twigs of a lime tree. The clerk got steps and a hook or something by which he pulled it down, and they found that the bird's wing was stuck, as they thought, by the honey dew to the leaf, while the play of the twig never let it get sufficient lateral pull to disengage it.