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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts
+and Men, by Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men
+       Brothers of Pity; Father Hedgehog and His Neighbours; Toots and Boots; The Hens of Hencastle; Flaps; A Week Spent in a Glass Pond; Among the Merrows; Tiny's Tricks and Toby's Tricks; The Owl in the Ivy Bush
+
+
+Author: Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
+
+
+
+Release Date: June 23, 2005  [eBook #16121]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BROTHERS OF PITY AND OTHER TALES
+OF BEASTS AND MEN***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Janet Blenkinship, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
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+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/6/1/2/16121/16121-h/16121-h.htm)
+      or
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+
+
+
+
+
+BROTHERS OF PITY
+AND OTHER TALES OF BEASTS AND MEN
+
+by
+
+JULIANA HORATIA EWING
+
+London:
+Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,
+Northumberland Avenue, W.C.
+Brighton: 129, North Street.
+New York: E. & J.B. Young & Co.
+[Published under the direction of the General Literature Committee.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+DEDICATED
+
+TO MY DEAR SISTER
+
+HORATIA KATHARINE FRANCES GATTY.
+
+J.H.E.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION.
+
+
+These tales have appeared, during some years past, in _Aunt Judy's
+Magazine for Young People_.
+
+"Father Hedgehog and his Neighbours," and "Toots and Boots," were both
+suggested by Fedor Flinzer's clever pictures; but "Toots" was also "a
+real person." In his latter days he was an honorary member of the Royal
+Engineers' Mess at Aldershot, and, on occasion, dined at table.
+
+"The Hens of Hencastle" is not mine. It is a free translation from the
+German of Victor Bluethgen, by Major Yeatman-Biggs, R.A., to whom I am
+indebted for permission to include it in my volume, as a necessary
+prelude to "Flaps." The story took my fancy greatly, but the ending
+seemed to me imperfect and unsatisfactory, especially in reference to so
+charming a character as the old watch dog, and I wrote "Flaps" as a
+sequel.
+
+The frontispiece was designed specially for this volume, by Mr. Charles
+Whymper, and the _Fratello della Misericordia_ (from a photograph kindly
+sent me by a friend) is by the same artist.
+
+J.H.E.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO NEW EDITION.
+
+
+The foregoing Preface was written by Mrs. Ewing for the first edition of
+_Brothers of Pity, and Other Tales_. The book contains five stories,
+illustrated by the pictures of which my sister speaks; and it is still
+sold by the S.P.C.K. "Toots and Boots" was so minutely adapted to
+Flinzer's pictures, that the tale suffers in being parted from them.
+Still, it is to be hoped that readers of the un-illustrated version will
+not have as much difficulty as Toots in solving the mystery of the
+Mouse's escape! I have added four more tales of "Beasts and Men" to the
+present edition, as they have not been included in any previous
+collections of my sister's stories. "A Week Spent in a Glass Pond"
+appeared first in _Aunt Judy's Magazine_, October 1876, and was
+afterwards published separately with coloured illustrations. The habits
+of the water beasts are described with the strictest fidelity to nature,
+even the delicate differences in character between the Great and the Big
+Black water beetles are most accurately drawn.
+
+"Among the Merrows" has not been republished since it came out in _Aunt
+Judy's Magazine_, November 1872. At that time the Crystal Palace
+Aquarium was a novelty, and the Zoological Station at Naples not fully
+formed--but, though the paper is behind the times in statistics, it is
+worth retaining for other reasons.
+
+"Tiny's Tricks and Toby's Tricks" as a specimen of versification might
+perhaps have been included in the volume of _Verses for Children_, but
+it seemed best to keep it with the "Owl Hoots," as these papers were the
+last that Mrs. Ewing wrote. The first appeared in _The Child's Pictorial
+Magazine_ a few days before her death, and the "Hoots" soon afterwards.
+The illustrations to both were drawn by Mr. Gordon Browne at my sister's
+special request, and they are now reproduced with gratitude for his
+labour of love.
+
+HORATIA K. F. EDEN.
+
+October 1895.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+   BROTHERS OF PITY
+
+   FATHER HEDGEHOG AND HIS NEIGHBOURS
+
+   TOOTS AND BOOTS
+
+   THE HENS OF HENCASTLE
+
+   FLAPS
+
+   A WEEK SPENT IN A GLASS POND
+
+   AMONG THE MERROWS
+
+   TINY'S TRICKS AND TOBY'S TRICKS
+
+   THE OWL IN THE IVY BUSH
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BROTHERS OF PITY.
+
+    "Who dug his grave?"
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "Who made his shroud?"
+      "I," said the Beetle,
+    "With my thread and needle,
+      I made his shroud."--_Death of Cock Robin_.
+
+
+It must be much easier to play at things when there are more of you than
+when there is only one.
+
+There is only one of me, and Nurse does not care about playing at
+things. Sometimes I try to persuade her; but if she is in a good temper
+she says she has got a bone in her leg, and if she isn't she says that
+when little boys can't amuse themselves it's a sure and certain sign
+they've got "the worrits," and the sooner they are put to bed with a
+Gregory's powder "the better for themselves and every one else."
+
+Godfather Gilpin can play delightfully when he has time, and he believes
+in fancy things, only he is so very busy with his books. But even when
+he is reading he will let you put him in the game. He doesn't mind
+pretending to be a fancy person if he hasn't to do anything, and if I do
+speak to him he always remembers who he is. That is why I like playing
+in his study better than in the nursery. And Nurse always says "He's
+safe enough, with the old gentleman," so I'm allowed to go there as much
+as I like.
+
+Godfather Gilpin lets me play with the books, because I always take care
+of them. Besides, there is nothing else to play with, except the
+window-curtains, for the chairs are always full. So I sit on the floor,
+and sometimes I build with the books (particularly Stonehenge), and
+sometimes I make people of them, and call them by the names on their
+backs, and the ones in other languages we call foreigners, and Godfather
+Gilpin tells me what countries they belong to. And sometimes I lie on my
+face and read (for I could read when I was four years old), and
+Godfather Gilpin tells me the hard words. The only rule he makes is,
+that I must get all the books out of one shelf, so that they are easily
+put away again. I may have any shelf I like, but I must not mix the
+shelves up.
+
+I always took care of the books, and never had any accident with any of
+them till the day I dropped Jeremy Taylor's _Sermons_. It made me very
+miserable, because I knew that Godfather Gilpin could never trust me so
+much again.
+
+However, if it had not happened, I should not have known anything about
+the Brothers of Pity; so, perhaps (as Mrs. James, Godfather Gilpin's
+house-keeper, says), "All's for the best," and "It's an ill wind that
+blows nobody good."
+
+It happened on a Sunday, I remember, and it was the day after the day on
+which I had had the shelf in which all the books were alike. They were
+all foreigners--Italians--and all their names were _Goldoni_, and there
+were forty-seven of them, and they were all in white and gold. I could
+not read any of them, but there were lots of pictures, only I did not
+know what the stories were about. So next day, when Godfather Gilpin
+gave me leave to play a Sunday game with the books, I thought I would
+have English ones, and big ones, for a change, for the _Goldonis_ were
+rather small.
+
+We played at church, and I was the parson, and Godfather Gilpin was the
+old gentleman who sits in the big pew with the knocker, and goes to
+sleep (because he wanted to go to sleep), and the books were the
+congregation. They were all big, but some of them were fat, and some of
+them were thin, like real people--not like the _Goldonis_, which were
+all alike.
+
+I was arranging them in their places and looking at their names, when I
+saw that one of them was called Taylor's _Sermons_, and I thought I
+would keep that one out and preach a real sermon out of it when I had
+read prayers. Of course I had to do the responses as well as "Dearly
+beloved brethren" and those things, and I had to sing the hymns too, for
+the books could not do anything, and Godfather Gilpin was asleep.
+
+When I had finished the service I stood behind a chair that was full of
+newspapers, for a pulpit, and I lifted up Taylor's _Sermons_, and rested
+it against the chair, and began to look to see what I would preach. It
+was an old book, bound in brown leather, and ornamented with gold, with
+a picture of a man in a black gown and a round black cap and a white
+collar in the beginning; and there was a list of all the sermons with
+their names and the texts. I read it through, to see which sounded the
+most interesting, and I didn't care much for any of them. However, the
+last but one was called "A Funeral Sermon, preached at the Obsequies of
+the Right Honourable the Countess of Carbery;" and I wondered what
+obsequies were, and who the Countess of Carbery was, and I thought I
+would preach that sermon and try to find out.
+
+There was a very long text, and it was not a very easy one. It was:
+"For we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground, which
+cannot be gathered up again: neither doth GOD respect any
+person: yet doth He devise means that His banished be not expelled from
+Him."
+
+The sermon wasn't any easier than the text, and half the _s_'s were like
+_f_'s which made it rather hard to preach, and there was Latin mixed up
+with it, which I had to skip. I had preached two pages when I got into
+the middle of a long sentence, of which part was this: "Every trifling
+accident discomposes us; and as the face of waters wafting in a storm so
+wrinkles itself, that it makes upon its forehead furrows deep and hollow
+like a grave: so do our great and little cares and trifles first make
+the wrinkles of old age, and then they dig a grave for us."
+
+I knew the meaning of the words "wrinkles," and "old age." Godfather
+Gilpin's forehead had unusually deep furrows, and, almost against my
+will, I turned so quickly to look if his wrinkles were at all like the
+graves in the churchyard, that Taylor's _Sermons_, in its heavy binding,
+slipped from the pulpit and fell to the ground.
+
+And Godfather Gilpin woke up, and (quite forgetting that he was really
+the old gentleman in the pew with the knocker) said, "Dear me, dear me!
+is that Jeremy Taylor that you are knocking about like a football? My
+dear child, I can't lend you my books to play with if you drop them on
+to the floor."
+
+I took it up in my arms and carried it sorrowfully to Godfather Gilpin.
+He was very kind, and said it was not hurt, and I might go on playing
+with the others; but I could see him stroking its brown leather and gold
+back, as if it had been bruised and wanted comforting, and I was far too
+sorry about it to go on preaching, even if I had had anything to preach.
+
+I picked up the smallest book I could see in the congregation, and sat
+down and pretended to read. There were pictures in it, but I turned over
+a great many, one after the other, before I could see any of them, my
+eyes were so full of tears of mortification and regret. The first
+picture I saw when my tears had dried up enough to let me see was a very
+curious one indeed. It was a picture of two men carrying what looked
+like another man covered with a blue quilt, on a sort of bier. But the
+funny part about it was the dress of the men. They were wrapped up in
+black cloaks, and had masks over their faces, and underneath the picture
+was written, "_Fratelli della Misericordia_"--"Brothers of Pity."
+
+I do not know whether the accident to Jeremy Taylor had made Godfather
+Gilpin too anxious about his books to sleep, but I found that he was
+keeping awake, and after a bit he said to me, "What are you staring so
+hard and so quietly at, little Mouse?"
+
+I looked at the back of the book, and it was called _Religious Orders_;
+so I said, "It's called _Religious Orders_, but the picture I'm looking
+at has got two men dressed in black, with their faces covered all but
+their eyes, and they are carrying another man with something blue over
+him."
+
+"_Fratelli della Misericordia_," said Godfather Gilpin.
+
+"Who are they, and what are they doing?" I asked. "And why are their
+faces covered?"
+
+"They belong to a body of men," was Godfather Gilpin's reply, "who bind
+themselves to be ready in their turn to do certain offices of mercy,
+pity, and compassion to the sick, the dying, and the dead. The
+brotherhood is six hundred years old, and still exists. The men who
+belong to it receive no pay, and they equally reject the reward of
+public praise, for they work with covered faces, and are not known even
+to each other. Rich men and poor men, noble men and working men, men of
+letters and the ignorant, all belong to it, and each takes his turn when
+it comes round to nurse the sick, carry the dying to hospital, and bury
+the dead.'
+
+"Is that a dead man under the blue coverlet?" I asked with awe.
+
+"I suppose so," said Godfather Gilpin.
+
+"But why don't his friends go to the funeral?" I inquired.
+
+"He has no friends to follow him," said my godfather. "That is why he is
+being buried by the Brothers of Pity."
+
+Long after Godfather Gilpin had told me all that he could tell me of the
+_Fratelli della Misericordia_--long after I had put the congregation
+(including the _Religious Orders_ and Taylor's _Sermons_) back into the
+shelf to which they belonged--the masked faces and solemn garb of the
+men in the picture haunted me.
+
+I have changed my mind a great many times, since I can remember, about
+what I will be when I am grown up. Sometimes I have thought I should
+like to be an officer and die in battle; sometimes I settled to be a
+clergyman and preach splendid sermons to enormous congregations; once I
+quite decided to be a head fireman and wear a brass helmet, and be
+whirled down lighted streets at night, every one making way for me, on
+errands of life and death.
+
+But the history of the Brothers of Pity put me out of conceit with all
+other heroes. It seemed better than anything I had ever thought of--to
+do good works unseen of men, without hope of reward, and to those who
+could make no return. For it rang in my ears that Godfather Gilpin had
+said, "He has no friends--that is why he is being buried by the Brothers
+of Pity."
+
+I quite understood what I thought they must feel, because I had once
+buried a cat who had no friends. It was a poor half-starved old thing,
+for the people it belonged to had left it, and I used to see it slinking
+up to the back door and looking at Tabby, who was very fat and sleek,
+and at the scraps on the unwashed dishes after dinner. Mrs. Jones kicked
+it out every time, and what happened to it before I found it lying
+draggled and dead at the bottom of the Ha-ha, with the top of a kettle
+still fastened to its scraggy tail, I never knew, and it cost me bitter
+tears to guess. It cost me some hard work, too, to dig the grave, for my
+spade was so very small.
+
+I don't think Mrs. Jones would have cared to be a Brother of Pity, for
+she was very angry with me for burying that cat, because it was such a
+wretched one, and so thin and dirty, and looked so ugly and smelt so
+nasty. But that was just why I wanted to give it a good funeral, and why
+I picked my crimson lily and put it in the grave, because it seemed so
+sad the poor thing should be like that when it might have been clean and
+fluffy, and fat and comfortable, like Tabby, if it had had a home and
+people to look after it.
+
+It was remembering about the cat that made me think that there were no
+Brothers of Pity (not even in Tuscany, for I asked Godfather Gilpin) to
+bury beasts and birds and fishes when they have no friends to go to
+their funerals. And that was how it was that I settled to be a Brother
+of Pity without waiting till I grew up and could carry men.
+
+I had a shilling of my own, and with sixpence of it I bought a yard and
+a half of black calico at the post-office shop, and Mrs. Jones made me a
+cloak out of it; and with the other sixpence I bought a mask--for they
+sell toys there too. It was not a right sort of mask, but I could not
+make Mrs. Jones understand about a hood with two eye-holes in it, and I
+did not like to show her the picture, for if she had seen that I wanted
+to play at burying people, perhaps she would not have made me the cloak.
+She made it very well, and it came down to my ankles, and I could hide
+my spade under it. The worst of the mask was that it was a funny one,
+with a big nose; but it hid my face all the same, and when you get
+inside a mask you can feel quite grave whatever it's painted like.
+
+I had never had so happy a summer before as the one when I was a Brother
+of Pity. I heard Nurse saying to Mrs. Jones that "there was no telling
+what would keep children out of mischief," for that I "never seemed to
+be tired of that old black rag and that ridiculous face."
+
+But it was not the dressing-up that pleased me day after day, it was the
+chance of finding dead bodies with no friends to bury them. Going out is
+quite a new thing when you have something to look for; and Godfather
+Gilpin says he felt just the same in the days when he used to collect
+insects.
+
+I found a good many corpses of one sort and another: birds and mice and
+frogs and beetles, and sometimes bigger bodies--such as kittens and
+dogs. The stand of my old wooden horse made a capital thing to drag them
+on, for all the wheels were there, and I had a piece of blue
+cotton-velvet to put on the top, but the day I found a dead mole I did
+not cover him. I put him outside, and he looked like black velvet lying
+on blue velvet. It seemed quite a pity to put him into the dirty ground,
+with such a lovely coat.
+
+One day I was coming back from burying a mouse, and I saw a "flying
+watchman" beetle lying quite stiff and dead, as I thought, with his legs
+stretched out, and no friends; so I put him on the bier at once, and put
+the blue velvet over him, and drew him to the place where the mouse's
+grave was. When I took the pall off and felt him, and turned him over
+and over, he was still quite rigid, so I felt sure he was dead, and
+began to dig his grave; but when I had finished and went back to the
+bier, the flying watchman was just creeping over the wheel. He had only
+pretended to be dead, and had given me all that trouble for nothing.
+
+When first I became a Brother of Pity, I thought I would have a
+graveyard to bury all the creatures in, but afterwards I changed my mind
+and settled to bury them all near wherever I found them. But I got some
+bits of white wood, and fastened them across each other with bits of
+wire, and so marked every grave.
+
+At last there were lots of them dotted about the fields and woods I
+knew. I remembered to whom most of them belonged, and even if I had
+forgotten, it made a very good game, to pretend to be a stranger in the
+neighbourhood, and then pretend to be somebody else, talking to myself,
+and saying, "Wherever you see those little graves some poor creature has
+been buried by the Brothers of Pity."
+
+I did not like to read the burial service, for fear it should not be
+quite right (especially for frogs; there were so many of them in summer,
+and they were so horrid-looking, I used to bury several together, and
+pretend it was the time of the plague); but I did not like not having
+any service at all. So when I put on my cloak and mask, and took my
+spade and the bier, I said, "Brothers, let us prepare to perform this
+work of mercy," which is the first thing the real _Fratelli della
+Misericordia_ say when they are going out. And when I buried the body I
+said, "Go in peace," which is the last thing that they say. Godfather
+Gilpin told me, and I learnt it by heart.
+
+I enjoyed it very much. There were graves of beasts and birds who had
+died without friends in the hedges and the soft parts of the fields in
+almost all our walks. I never showed them to Nurse, but I often wondered
+that she did not notice them. I always touched my hat when I passed
+them, and sometimes it was very difficult to do so without her seeing
+me, but it made me quite uncomfortable if I passed a grave without. When
+I could not find any bodies I amused myself with making wreaths to hang
+over particularly nice poor beasts, such as a bullfinch or a kitten.
+
+I had been a Brother of Pity for several months, when a very curious
+thing happened.
+
+One summer evening I went by myself after tea into a steep little field
+at the back of our house, with an old stone-quarry at the top, on the
+ledges of which, where the earth had settled, I used to play at making
+gardens. And there, lying on a bit of very stony ground, half on the
+stones and half on the grass, was a dead robin-redbreast. I love robins
+very much, and it was not because I wanted one to die, but because I
+thought that if one did die, I should so like to bury him, that I had
+wished to find a dead robin ever since I became a Brother of Pity. It
+was rather late, but it wanted nearly an hour to my usual bedtime, so I
+thought I would go home at once for my dress and spade and bier, and for
+some roses. For I had resolved to bury this (my first robin-redbreast)
+in a grave lined with rose-leaves, and to give him a wreath of
+forget-me-nots.
+
+Just as I was going I heard a loud buzz above my head, and something hit
+me in the face. It was a beetle, whirring about in the air, and as I
+turned to leave poor Robin the beetle sat down on him, on the middle of
+his red breast, and by still hearing the buzzing, I found that another
+beetle was whirling and whirring just above my head in the air. I like
+beetles (especially the flying watchmen), and these ones were black too;
+so I said, for fun, "You've got on your black things, and if you'll take
+care of the body till I get my spade you shall be Brothers of Pity."
+
+I ran home, and I need not have gone indoors at all, for I keep my cloak
+and my spade and the bier in the summer-house, but the bits of wood were
+in the nursery cupboard, so, after I had got some good roses, and was
+quite ready, I ran up-stairs, and there, to my great vexation, Nurse met
+me, and said I was to go to bed.
+
+I thought it was very hard, because it had been a very hot day, and I
+had had to go a walk in the heat of the sun along the old coaching-road
+with Nurse, and it seemed so provoking, now it was cool and the moon was
+rising, that I should have to go to bed, especially as Nurse was sending
+me there earlier than usual because she wanted to go out herself, and I
+knew it.
+
+I tried to go to sleep, but I couldn't. Every time I opened my eyes the
+moonlight was more and more like daylight through the white blind. At
+last I almost thought I must have really been to sleep without knowing
+it, and that it must be morning. So I got out of bed, and went to the
+window and peeped; but it was still moonlight--only moonlight as bright
+as day--and I saw Nurse and two of the maids just going through the
+upper gate into the park.
+
+In one moment I made up my mind. Nurse had only put me to bed to get me
+out of the way. I did not mean to trouble her, but I was determined not
+to lose the chance of being Brother of Pity to a robin-redbreast.
+
+I dressed myself as well as I could, got out unobserved, and made my way
+to the summer-house. Things look a little paler by moonlight, otherwise
+I could see quite well. I put on my cloak, took my spade and the handle
+of the bier in my right hand, and holding the mask over my face with my
+left, I made my way to the quarry field.
+
+It was a lovely night, and as I strolled along I thought with myself
+that the ground where Robin lay was too stony for my spade, and that I
+must move him a little lower, where some soft earth bordered one side of
+the quarry.
+
+I was as certain as I had ever been of anything that I did not think
+about this till then, but when I got to the quarry the body was gone
+from the place where I had found it; and when I looked lower, on the bit
+of soft earth there lay Robin, just in the place where I was settling in
+my mind that I would bury him.
+
+I could not believe my eyes through the holes in my mask, so I pulled it
+off, but there was no doubt about the fact. There he lay; and round him,
+when I looked closer, I saw a ridge like a rampart of earth, which
+framed him neatly and evenly, as if he were already halfway into his
+grave.
+
+The moonlight was as clear as day, there was no mistake as to what I
+saw, and whilst I was looking the body of the bird began to sink by
+little jerks, as if some one were pulling it from below. When first it
+moved I thought that poor Robin could not be dead after all, and that he
+was coming to life again like the flying watchman, but I soon saw that
+he was not, and that some one was pulling him down into a grave.
+
+When I felt quite sure of this, when I had rubbed my eyes to clear them,
+and pulled up the lashes to see if I was awake, I was so horribly
+frightened that, with my mask in one hand and the spade and the handle
+of my bier in the other, I ran home as fast as my legs would carry me,
+leaving the roses and the cross and the blue-velvet pall behind me in
+the quarry.
+
+Nurse was still out; and I crept back to bed without detection, where I
+dreamed disturbedly of invisible gravediggers all through the night.
+
+I did not feel quite so much afraid by daylight, but I was not a bit
+less puzzled as to how Cock Robin had been moved from the stony place to
+the soft earth, and who dug his grave. I could not ask Nurse about it,
+for I should have had to tell her I had been out, and I could not have
+trusted Mrs. Jones either; but Godfather Gilpin never tells tales of me,
+and he knows everything, so I went to him.
+
+The more I thought of it the more I saw that the only way was to tell
+him everything; for if you only tell parts of things you sometimes find
+yourself telling lies before you know where you are. So I put on my
+cloak and my mask, and took the shovel and bier into the study, and sat
+down on the little foot-stool I always wait on when Godfather Gilpin is
+in the middle of reading, and keeps his head down to show that he does
+not want to be disturbed.
+
+When he shut up his book and looked at me he burst out laughing. I meant
+to have asked him why, but I was so busy afterwards I forgot. I suppose
+it was the nose, for it had got rather broken when I fell down as I was
+burying the old drake that Neptune killed.
+
+But he was very kind to me, and I told him all about my being a Brother
+of Pity, and how I had wanted to bury a robin, and how I had found one,
+and how he had frightened me by burying himself.
+
+"Some other Brother of Pity must have found him," said my godfather,
+still laughing. "And he must have got Jack the Giant-killer's cloak of
+darkness for _his_ dress, so that you did not see him."
+
+"There was nobody there," I earnestly answered, shaking my mask as I
+thought of the still, lonely moonlight. "Nothing but two beetles, and I
+said if they would take care of him they might be Brothers of Pity."
+
+"They took you at your word, _mio fratello_. Take off your mask, which a
+little distracts me, and I will tell you who buried Cock Robin."
+
+I knew when Godfather Gilpin was really telling me things--without
+thinking of something else, I mean,--and I listened with all my ears.
+
+"The beetles whom you very properly admitted into your brotherhood,"
+said my godfather, "were burying beetles, or sexton beetles,[A] as they
+are sometimes called. They bury animals of all sizes in a surprisingly
+short space of time. If two of them cannot conduct the funeral, they
+summon others. They carry the bodies, if necessary, to suitable ground.
+With their flat heads (for the sexton beetle does not carry a shovel as
+you do) they dig trench below trench all round the body they are
+committing to the earth, after which they creep under it and pull it
+down, and then shovel away once more, and so on till it is deep enough
+in, and then they push the earth over it and tread it and pat it neatly
+down."
+
+"Then was it the beetles who were burying the robin-redbreast?" I
+gasped.
+
+"I suspect so," said Godfather Gilpin. "But we will go and see."
+
+He actually knocked a book down in his hurry to get his hat, and when I
+helped him to pick it up, and said, "Why, godfather, you're as bad as I
+was about Taylor's _Sermons_," he said, "I am an old fool, my dear. I
+used to be very fond of insects before I settled down to the work I'm at
+now, and it quite excites me to go out into the fields again."
+
+I never had a nicer walk, for he showed me lots of things I had never
+noticed, before we got to the quarry field; and then I took him straight
+to the place where the bit of soft earth was, and there was nothing to
+be seen, and the earth was quite smooth and tidy. But when he poked with
+his stick the ground was very soft, and after he had poked a little we
+saw some nut-brown feathers, and we knew it was Robin's grave.
+
+And I said, "Don't poke any more, please. I wanted to bury him with
+rose-leaves, but the beetles were dressed in black, and I gave them
+leave, and I think I'll put a cross over him, because I don't think it's
+untrue to show that he was buried by the Brothers of Pity."
+
+Godfather Gilpin quite agreed with me, and we made a nice mound (for I
+had brought my spade), and put the best kind of cross, and afterwards I
+made a wreath of forget-me-nots to hang on it.
+
+He was the only robin-redbreast I have found since I became a Brother of
+Pity, and that was how it was that it was not I who buried him after
+all.
+
+Many of the walks that Nurse likes to take I do not care about, but one
+place she likes to go to, especially on Sunday, I like too, and that is
+the churchyard.
+
+I was always fond of it. It is so very nice to read the tombstones, and
+fancy what the people were like, particularly the ones who lived long
+ago, in 1600 and something, with beautifully-shaped sixes and capital
+letters on their graves. For they must have dressed quite differently
+from us, and perhaps they knew Charles the First and Oliver Cromwell.
+
+Diggory the gravedigger never talks much, but I like to watch him. I
+think he is rather deaf, for when I asked him if he thought, if he went
+on long enough, he could dig himself through to the other side of the
+world, he only said "Hey?" and chucked up a great shovelful of earth.
+But perhaps it was because he was so deep down that he could not hear.
+
+Now, when he is quite out of sight, and chucks the earth up like that,
+it makes me think of the sexton beetles; for Godfather Gilpin says they
+drive their flat heads straight down, and then lift them with a sharp
+jerk, and throw the earth up so.
+
+I said to Diggory one day, "Don't you wish your head was flat, instead
+of being as it is, so that you could shovel with it instead of having to
+have a spade?"
+
+He wasn't so deep down that time, and he heard me, and put his head up
+out of the grave and rested on his spade. But he only scratched his head
+and stared, and said, "You be an uncommon queer young gentleman, to be
+sure," and then went on digging again. And I was afraid he was angry, so
+I daren't ask him any more.
+
+I daren't of course ask him if he is a Brother of Pity, but I think he
+deserves to be, for workhouse burials at any rate; for if you have only
+the Porter and Silly Billy at your funeral, I don't think you can call
+that having friends.
+
+I have taken the beetles for my brothers, of course. Godfather Gilpin
+says I should find far more bodies than I do if they were not burying
+all along. I often wish I could understand them when they hum, and that
+they knew me.
+
+I wonder if either they or Diggory know that they belong to the order of
+_Fratelli della Misericordia_, and that I belong to it too?
+
+But of course it would not be right to ask them, even if either of them
+would answer me, for if we were "known, even to each other," we should
+not really and truly be Brothers of Pity.
+
+     NOTE--Burying beetles are to the full as skilful as they
+     are described in this tale. With a due respect for the graces of
+     art, I have not embodied the fact that they feed on the carcases
+     which they bury. The last thing that the burying beetle does, after
+     tidying the grave, is to make a small hole and go down himself,
+     having previously buried his partner with their prey. Here the eggs
+     are laid, and the larvae hatched and fed.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote A: _Necrophorus humator_, &c.]
+
+
+
+FATHER HEDGEHOG AND HIS NEIGHBOURS.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+The care of a large family is no light matter, as everybody knows. And
+that year I had an unusually large family. No less than seven young
+urchins for Mrs. Hedgehog and myself to take care of and start in life;
+and there was not a prickly parent on this side of the brook, or within
+three fields beyond, who had more than four.
+
+My father's brother had six one year, I know. It was the summer that I
+myself was born. I can remember hearing my father and mother talk about
+it before I could see. As these six cousins were discussed in a tone of
+interest and respect which seemed to bear somewhat disparagingly on me
+and my brother and sisters (there were only four of _us_), I was rather
+glad to learn that they also had been born blind. My father used to go
+and see them, and report their progress to my mother on his return.
+
+"They can see to-day."
+
+"They have curled themselves up. Every one of them. Six beautiful little
+balls; as round as crab-apples and as safe as burrs!"
+
+I tried to curl myself up, but I could only get my coat a little way
+over my nose. I cried with vexation. But one should not lose heart too
+easily. With patience and perseverance most things can be brought about,
+and I could soon both see and curl myself into a ball. It was about this
+time that my father hurried home one day, tossing the leaves at least
+three inches over his head as he bustled along.
+
+"What in the hedge do you think has happened to the six?" said he.
+
+"Oh, don't tell me!" cried my mother; "I am so nervous." (Which she was,
+and rather foolish as well, which used to irritate my father, who was
+hasty tempered, as I am myself.)
+
+"They've been taken by gipsies and flitted," said he.
+
+"What do you mean by _flitted_?" inquired my mother.
+
+"A string is tied round a hind-leg of each, and they are tethered in the
+grass behind the tent, just as the donkey is tethered. So they will
+remain till they grow fat, and then they will be cooked."
+
+"Will the donkey be cooked when he is fat?" asked my mother.
+
+"I smell valerian," said my father; on which she put out her nose, and
+he ran at it with his prickles. He always did this when he was annoyed
+with any member of his family; and though we knew what was coming, we
+are all so fond of valerian, we could never resist the temptation to
+sniff, just on the chance of there being some about.
+
+I had long wanted to see my cousins, and I now begged my father to let
+me go with him the next time he went to visit them. But he was rather
+cross that morning, and he ran at me with his back up.
+
+"So you want to gad about and be kidnapped and flitted too, do you? Just
+let me--"
+
+But when I saw him coming, I rolled myself up as tight as a wood-louse,
+and as my ears were inside I really did not hear what else he said. But
+I was not a whit the less resolved to see my cousins.
+
+One day my father bustled home.
+
+"Upon my whine," said he, "they live on the fat of the land. Scraps of
+all kinds, apples, and a dish of bread and milk under their very noses.
+I sat inside a gorse bush on the bank, and watched them till my mouth
+watered."
+
+The next day he reported--
+
+"They've cooked one--in clay. There are only five now."
+
+And the next day--
+
+"They've cooked another. Now there are only four."
+
+"There won't be a cousin left if I wait much longer," thought I.
+
+On the morrow there were only three.
+
+My mother began to cry. "My poor dear nephews and nieces!" said she
+(though she had never seen them). "What a world this is!"
+
+"We must take it as we eat eggs," said my father, with that air of
+wisdom which naturally belongs to the sayings of the head of the family,
+"the shell with the yolk. And they have certainly had excellent
+victuals."
+
+Next morning he went off as usual, and I crept stealthily after him.
+With his spines laid flat to his sides, and his legs well under him, he
+ran at a good round pace, and as he did not look back I followed him
+with impunity. By and by he climbed a bank and then crept into a furze
+bush, whose prickles were no match for his own. I dared not go right
+into the bush for fear he should see me, but I settled myself as well as
+I could under shelter of a furze branch, and looked down on to the other
+side of the bank, where my father's nose was also directed. And there I
+saw my three cousins, tethered as he had said, and apparently very busy
+over-eating themselves on food which they had not had the trouble of
+procuring.
+
+If I had heard less about the cooking, I might have envied them; as it
+was, that somewhat voracious appetite characteristic of my family
+disturbed my judgment sufficiently to make me almost long to be flitted
+myself. I fancy it must have been when I pushed out my nose and sniffed
+involuntarily towards the victuals, that the gipsy man heard me.
+
+He had been lying on the grass, looking much lazier than my
+cousins--which is saying a good deal--and only turning his swarthy face
+when the gipsy girl, as she moved about and tended the fire, got out of
+the sight of his eyes. Then he moved so that he could see her again;
+not, as it seemed, to see what she was doing or to help her to do it,
+but as leaves move with the wind, or as we unpacked our noses against
+our wills when my father said he smelt valerian.
+
+She was very beautiful. Her skin was like a trout pool--clear and yet
+brown. I never saw any eyes like her eyes, though our neighbour's--the
+Water Rat--at times recalls them. Her hair was the colour of ripe
+blackberries in a hot hedge--very ripe ones, with the bloom on. She
+moved like a snake. I have seen my father chase a snake more than once,
+and I have seen a good many men and women in my time. Some of them walk
+like my father, they bustle along and kick up the leaves as he does; and
+some of them move quickly and yet softly, as snakes go. The gipsy girl
+moved so, and wherever she went the gipsy man's eyes went after her.
+
+Suddenly he turned them on me. For an instant I was paralyzed and stood
+still. I could hear my father bustling down the bank; in a few minutes
+he would be at home, where my brother and sisters were safe and sound,
+whilst I was alone and about to reap the reward of my disobedience, in
+the fate of which he had warned me--to be taken by gipsies and flitted.
+
+Nothing, my dear children--my seven dear children--is more fatal in an
+emergency than indecision. I was half disposed to hurry after my father,
+and half resolved to curl myself into a ball. I had one foot out and
+half my back rounded, when the gipsy man pinned me to the ground with a
+stick, and the gipsy girl strode up. I could not writhe myself away from
+the stick, but I gazed beseechingly at the gipsy girl and squealed for
+my life.
+
+"Let the poor little brute go, Basil," she said, laughing. "We've three
+flitted still."
+
+"Let it go?" cried the young man scornfully, and with another poke,
+which I thought had crushed me to bits, though I was still able to cry
+aloud.
+
+The gipsy girl turned her back and went away with one movement and
+without speaking.
+
+"Sybil!" cried the man; but she did not look round.
+
+"Sybil, I say!"
+
+She was breaking sticks for the fire slowly across her knee, but she
+made no answer. He took his stick out of my back, and went after her.
+
+"I've let it go," he said, throwing himself down again, "and a good
+dinner has gone with it. But you can do what you like with me--and small
+thanks I get for it."
+
+"I can do anything with you but keep you out of mischief," she answered,
+fixing her eyes steadily on him. He sat up and began to throw stones,
+aiming them at my three cousins.
+
+"Take me for good and all, instead of tormenting me, and you will," he
+said.
+
+"Will you give up Jemmy and his gang?" she asked; but as he hesitated
+for an instant, she tossed the curls back from her face and moved away,
+saying, "Not you; for all your talk! And yet for your sake, _I_ would
+give up--"
+
+He bounded to his feet, but she had put the bonfire between them, and
+before he could get round it, she was on the other side of a tilted
+cart, where another woman, in a crimson cloak, sat doing something to a
+dirty pack of cards.
+
+I did not like to see the gipsy man on his feet again, and having
+somewhat recovered breath, I scrambled down the bank and got home as
+quickly as the stiffness and soreness of my skin would allow.
+
+I never saw my cousins again, and it was long before I saw any more
+gipsies; for that day's adventure gave me a shock to which my children
+owe the exceeding care and prudence that I display in the choice of our
+summer homes and winter retreats, and in repressing every tendency to a
+wandering disposition among the members of my family.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+That summer--I mean the summer when I had seven--we had the most
+charming home imaginable. It was in a wood, and on that side of the wood
+which is farthest from houses and highroads. Here it was bounded by a
+brook, and beyond this lay a fine pasture field.
+
+There are fields and fields. I never wish to know a better field than
+this one. I seldom go out much till the evening, but if business should
+take one along the hedge in the heat of the sun, there are as juicy and
+refreshing crabs to be picked up under a tree about half-way down the
+south side, as the thirstiest creature could desire.
+
+And when the glare and drought of midday have given place to the mild
+twilight of evening, and the grass is refreshingly damped with dew, and
+scents are strong, and the earth yields kindly to the nose, what beetles
+and lob-worms reward one's routing!
+
+I am convinced that the fattest and stupidest slugs that live, live near
+the brook. I never knew one who found out I was eating him, till he was
+half-way down my throat. And just opposite to the place where I
+furnished your dear mother's nest, is a small plantation of burdocks, on
+the underside of which stick the best flavoured snails I am acquainted
+with, in such inexhaustible quantities, that a hedgehog might have
+fourteen children in a season, and not fear their coming short of
+provisions.
+
+And in the early summer, in the long grass on the edge of the wood--but
+no! I will not speak of it.
+
+My dear children, my seven dear children, may you never know what it is
+to taste a pheasant's egg--to taste several pheasant's eggs, and to eat
+them, shells and all.
+
+There are certain pleasures of which a parent may himself have partaken,
+but which, if he cannot reconcile them with his ideas of safety and
+propriety, he will do well not to allow his children even to hear of. I
+do not say that I wish I had never tasted a pheasant's egg myself, but,
+when I think of traps baited with valerian, of my great-uncle's
+great-coat nailed to the keeper's door, of the keeper's heavy-heeled
+boots, and of the impropriety of poaching, I feel, as a father, that it
+is desirable that you should never know that there are such things as
+eggs, and then you will be quite happy without them.
+
+But it was not the abundant and varied supply of food which had
+determined my choice of our home: it was not even because no woodland
+bower could be more beautiful,--because the coppice foliage was fresh
+and tender overhead, and the old leaves soft and elastic to the prickles
+below,--because the young oaks sheltered us behind, and we had a
+charming outlook over the brook in front, between a gnarled alder and a
+young sycamore, whose embracing branches were the lintel of our doorway.
+
+No. I chose this particular spot in this particular wood, because I had
+reason to believe it to be a somewhat neglected bit of what men call
+"property,"--because the bramble bushes were unbroken, the fallen leaves
+untrodden, the hyacinths and ragged-robins ungathered by human feet and
+hands,--because the old fern-fronds faded below the fresh green
+plumes,--because the violets ripened seed,--because the trees were
+unmarked by woodmen and overpopulated with birds, and the water-rat sat
+up in the sun with crossed paws and without a thought of
+danger,--because, in short, no birds'-nesting, fern-digging,
+flower-picking, leaf-mould-wanting, vermin-hunting creatures ever came
+hither to replenish their ferneries, gardens, cages, markets, and
+museums.
+
+My feelings can therefore be imagined when I was roused from an
+afternoon nap one warm summer's day by the voices of men and women.
+Several possibilities came into my mind, and I imparted them to my wife.
+
+"They may be keepers."
+
+"They may be poachers."
+
+"They may be boys birds'-nesting."
+
+"They may be street-sellers of ferns, moss, and so forth."
+
+"They may be collectors of specimens."
+
+"They may be pic-nic-ers--people who bring salt twisted up in a bit of
+paper with them, and leave it behind when they go away. Don't let the
+children touch it!"
+
+"They may be--and this is the worst that could happen--men collecting
+frogs, toads, newts, snails, _and hedgehogs_ for the London markets. We
+must keep very quiet. They will go away at sunset."
+
+I was quite wrong, and when I heard the slow wheels of a cart I knew
+it. They were none of these things, and they did not go away. They were
+travelling tinkers, and they settled down and made themselves at home
+within fifty yards of mine.
+
+My nerves have never been strong since that day under the furze bush. My
+first impulse was to roll myself up so tightly that I got the cramp,
+whilst every spine on my back stood stiff with fright. But after a time
+I recovered myself, and took counsel with Mrs. Hedgehog.
+
+"Two things," said she, "are most important. We must keep the children
+from gadding, and we must make them hold their tongues."
+
+"They never can be so foolish as to wish to quit your side, my dear, in
+the circumstances," said I. But I was mistaken.
+
+I know nothing more annoying to a father who has learned the danger of
+indiscreet curiosity in his youth, than to find his sons apparently
+quite uninfluenced by his valuable experience.
+
+"What are tinkers like?" was the first thing said by each one of the
+seven on the subject.
+
+"They are a set of people," I replied, in a voice as sour as a green
+crab, "who if they hear us talking, or catch us walking abroad, will
+kill your mother and me, and temper up two bits of clay and roll us up
+in them. Then they will put us into a fire to bake, and when the clay
+turns red they will take us out. The clay will fall off and our coats
+with it. What remains they will eat--as we eat snails. You seven will be
+flitted. That is, you will be pegged to the ground till you grow big."
+(I thought it well not to mention the bread and milk.) "Then they will
+kill and bake and eat you in the same fashion."
+
+I think this frightened the children; but they would talk about the
+tinkers, though they dared not go near them.
+
+"The best thing you can do," said Mrs. Hedgehog, "is to tell them a
+story to keep them quiet. You can modulate your own voice, and stop if
+you hear the tinkers."
+
+Hereupon I told them a story (a very old one) of the hedgehog who ran a
+race with a hare, on opposite sides of a hedge, for the wager of a louis
+d'or and a bottle of brandy. It was a great favourite with them.
+
+"The moral of the tale, my dear children," I was wont to say, "is, that
+our respected ancestor's head saved his heels, which is never the case
+with giddy-pated creatures like the hare."
+
+"Perhaps it was a very young hare," said Mrs. Hedgehog, who is amiable,
+and does not like to blame any one if it can be avoided.
+
+"I don't think it can have been a _very_ young hare," said I, "or the
+hedgehog would have eaten him instead of outwitting him. As it was, he
+placed himself and Mrs. Hedgehog at opposite ends of the course. The
+hare started on one side of the hedge and the hedgehog on the other.
+Away went the hare like the wind, but Mr. Hedgehog took three steps and
+went back to his place. When the hare reached his end of the hedge, Mrs.
+Hedgehog, from the other side, called out, 'I'm here already.' Her voice
+and her coat were very like her husband's, and the hare was not
+observant enough to remark a slight difference of size and colour. The
+moral of which is, my dear children, that one must use his eyes as well
+as his legs in this world. The hare tried several runs, but there was
+always a hedgehog at the goal when he got there. So he gave in at last,
+and our ancestors walked comfortably home, taking the louis d'or and the
+bottle of brandy with them."
+
+"What is a louis d'or?" cried three of my children; and "What is
+brandy?" asked the other four.
+
+"I smell valerian," said I; on which they poked out their seven noses,
+and I ran at them with my spines, for a father who is not an
+Encyclopaedia on all fours must adopt _some_ method of checking the
+inquisitiveness of the young.
+
+When grown-up people desire information or take an interest in their
+neighbours, this, of course, is another matter. Mrs. Hedgehog and I had
+never seen tinkers, and we resolved to take an early opportunity some
+evening of sending the seven urchins down to the burdock plantations to
+pick snails, whilst we paid a cautious visit to the tinker camp.
+
+But mothers are sad fidgets, and anxious as Mrs. Hedgehog was to gratify
+her curiosity, she kept putting off our expedition till the children's
+spines should be harder; so I made one or two careful ones by myself,
+and told her all the news on my return.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+"The animal Man," so I have heard my uncle, who was a learned hedgehog,
+say,--"the animal man is a diurnal animal; he comes out and feeds in the
+daytime." But a second cousin, who had travelled as far as Covent
+Garden, and who lived for many years in a London kitchen, told me that
+he thought my uncle was wrong, and that man comes out and feeds at
+night. He said he knew of at least one house in which the crickets and
+black-beetles never got a quiet kitchen to themselves till it was nearly
+morning.
+
+But I think my uncle was right about men in the country. I am sure the
+tinker and his family slept at night. He and his wife were out a great
+deal during the day. They went away from the wood and left the children
+with an old woman, who was the tinker's mother. At one time they were
+away for several days, and about my usual time for going out the
+children were asleep, and the old woman used to sit over the camp fire
+with her head on her hands.
+
+"The language of men, my dear," I observed to Mrs. Hedgehog, "is quite
+different to ours, even in general tone; but I assure you that when I
+first heard the tinker's mother, I could have wagered a louis d'or and a
+bottle of brandy that I heard hedgehogs whining to each other. In fact,
+I was about to remonstrate with them for their imprudence, when I found
+out that it was the old woman who was moaning and muttering to herself."
+
+"What is the matter with her?" asked Mrs. Hedgehog.
+
+"I was curious to know myself," said I, "and from what I have overheard,
+I think I can inform you. She is the tinker's mother, and judging from
+what he said the other night, was not by any means indulgent to him when
+he was a child. She is harsh enough to his young brats now; but it
+appears that she was devoted to an older son, one of the children of
+his first wife; and that it is for the loss of this grandchild that she
+vexes herself."
+
+"Is he dead?"
+
+"No, my dear, but--"
+
+"Has he been flitted?"
+
+"Something of the kind, I fear. He has been taken to prison."
+
+"Dear, dear!" said Mrs. Hedgehog; "what a trial to a mother's feelings!
+Will they bake him?"
+
+"I think not," said I. "I fancy that he is tethered up as a punishment
+for taking what did not belong to him; and the grandmother's grievance
+seems to be that she believes he was unjustly convicted. She thinks the
+real robber was a gipsy. Just as if I were taken, and my skin nailed to
+the keeper's door for pheasant's eggs which I had never had the pleasure
+of eating."
+
+Mrs. Hedgehog was now dying of curiosity. She said she thought the
+children's spines were strong enough for anything that was likely to
+happen to them; and so the next fresh damp evening we sent the seven
+urchins down to the burdocks to pick snails, and crept cautiously
+towards the tinker's encampment to see what we could see. And there, by
+the smouldering embers of a bonfire, sat the old woman moaning, as I had
+described her, with her elbows on her knees, rocking and nursing her
+head, from which her long hair was looped and fell, like grey rags,
+about her withered fingers.
+
+"I don't like her looks," snorted Mrs. Hedgehog. "And how disgustingly
+they have trampled the grass."
+
+"It is quite true," said I; "it will not recover itself this summer. I
+wish they had left us our wood to ourselves."
+
+At this moment Mrs. Hedgehog laid her five toes on mine, to attract my
+attention, and whispered--"Is it a gipsy?" and lifting my nose in the
+direction of the rustling brushwood, I saw Sybil. There was no mistaking
+her, though her cheeks looked hollower and her eyes larger than when I
+saw her last.
+
+"Good-evening, mother," she said.
+
+The old woman raised her gaunt face with a start, and cried fiercely,
+"Begone with you! Begone!" and then bent it again upon her hands,
+muttering, "There are plenty of hedges and ditches too good for your
+lot, without their coming to worrit us in our wood."
+
+The gipsy girl knelt quietly by the fire, and stirred up the embers.
+
+"What is the matter, mother?" she said. "We've only just come, and when
+I heard that Tinker George and his mother were in the wood, I started to
+find you. 'You makes too free with the tinkers,' says my brother's
+wife. 'I goes to see my mother,' says I, 'who nursed me through a
+sickness, my real mother being dead, and my own people wanting to bury
+me through my not being able to speak or move, and their wanting to get
+to the Bartelmy Fair.' I never forget, mother; have you forgotten me,
+that you drives me away for bidding you good-day?"
+
+"Good days are over for me," moaned the old woman. "Begone, I say! Don't
+let me see or hear any that belongs to Black Basil, or it may be the
+worse for them."
+
+("The tinker-mother whines very nastily," said Mrs. Hedgehog. "If I were
+the young woman, I should bite her."
+
+"Hush!" I answered, "she is speaking.")
+
+"Basil is in prison," said the gipsy girl hoarsely.
+
+The old woman's eyes shone in their sockets, as she looked up at Sybil
+for a minute, as if to read the gipsy's sentence on her face; and then
+she chuckled,
+
+"So they've taken the Terror of the Roads?"
+
+Sybil's eyes had not moved from the fire, before which she was now
+standing with clasped hands.
+
+"The Terror of the Roads?" she said. "Yes, they call him that,--but I
+could turn him round my finger, mother." Her voice had dropped, and she
+smoothed one of her black curls absently round her finger as she spoke.
+
+"You couldn't keep him out of prison," taunted the old woman.
+
+"I couldn't keep him out of mischief," said the girl, sadly; and then,
+with a sudden flash of anger, she clasped her hands above her head and
+cried, "A black curse on Jemmy and his gang!"
+
+"A black curse on them as lets the innocent go to prison in their stead.
+They comes there themselves in the end, and long may it hold them!" was
+the reply.
+
+Sybil moved swiftly to the old woman's side.
+
+"I heard you was in trouble, mother, about Christian; but you don't
+think--"
+
+"_Think!_" screamed the old woman, shaking her fists, whilst the girl
+interrupted her--
+
+"Hush, mother, hush! tell me now, tell me all, but not so loud," and
+kneeling with her back to us, she said something more in a low voice, to
+which the old woman replied in a whine so much moderated, that though
+Mrs. Hedgehog and I strained our ears, and crept as near the group as we
+dared, we could not catch a word.
+
+Only, after a while Sybil rose up and walked back slowly to the fire,
+twisting the long lock of her hair as before, and saying--"I turns him
+round my finger, mother, as far as _that_ goes--"
+
+"So you thinks," said the old crone. "But he never will--even if you
+would, Sybil Stanley! Oh Christian, my child, my child!"
+
+The gipsy girl stood still, like a young poplar-tree in the dead calm
+before thunder; and there fell a silence, in which I dared not have
+moved myself, or allowed Mrs. Hedgehog to move, three steps through the
+softest grass, for fear of being heard.
+
+Then Sybil said abruptly, "I've never rightly heard about Christian,
+mother. What was it made you think so much more of him than you thinks
+about the others?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+"My son's first wife died after Christian was born," said the old woman.
+"I've a sharp tongue, as you know, Sybil Stanley, and I'm doubtful if
+she was too happy while she lived; but when she was gone I knew she'd
+been a good 'un, and I've always spoken of her accordingly.
+
+"You're too young to remember that year; it was a year of slack trade
+and hard times all over. Farmer-folk grudged you fourpence to mend the
+kettle, and as to broken victuals, there wasn't as much went in at the
+front door to feed the family, as the servants would have thrown out at
+the back door another year to feed the pigs.
+
+"When one gets old, my daughter, and sits over the fire at night and
+thinks, instead of tramping all day and sleeping heavy after it, as one
+does when one is young--things comes back; things comes back, I say, as
+they says ghosts does.
+
+"And when we camps near trees with long branches, like them over there,
+that waves in the wind and confuses your eyes among the smoke, I
+sometimes think I sees her face, as it was before she died, with a
+pinched look across the nose. That is Christian's mother, my son's first
+wife; and it comes back to me that I believes she starved herself to let
+him have more; for he's a man with a surly temper, like my own, is my
+son George. He grumbled worse than the children when he was hungry, and
+because she was so slow in getting strong enough to stand on her legs
+and carry the basket. You see he didn't hold his tongue when things were
+bad to bear, as she could. Men doesn't, my daughter."
+
+"I know, I know," said the girl.
+
+"I thinks I was jealous of her," muttered the old woman; "it comes back
+to me that I begrudged her making so much of my son, but I knows now
+that she was a good 'un, and I speaks of her accordingly. She fretted
+herself about getting strong enough to carry the child to be
+christened, while we had the convenience of a parson near at hand, and I
+wasn't going to oblige her; but the day after she died, the child was
+ailing, and thinking it might require the benefit of a burial-service as
+well as herself, I wrapped it up, and made myself decent, and took my
+way to the village. I was half-way up the street, when I met a young
+gentlewoman in a grey dress coming out of a cottage.
+
+"'Good-day, my pretty lady,' says I. 'Could you show an old woman the
+residence of the clergyman that would do the poor tinkers the kindness
+of christening a sick child whose mother lies dead in a tilted cart at
+the meeting of the four roads?'
+
+"'I'm the clergyman's wife,' says she, with the colour in her face, 'and
+I'm sure my husband will christen the poor baby. Do let me see it.'
+
+"'It's only a tinker's child,' says I, 'a poor brown-faced morsel for a
+pretty lady's blue eyes to rest upon, that's accustomed to the delicate
+sight of her own golden-haired children; long may they live, and many
+may you and the gentle clergyman have of them!'
+
+"'I have no children,' says she, shortly, with the colour in her face
+breaking up into red and white patches over her cheeks. 'Let me carry
+the baby for you,' says she, a taking it from me. 'You must be tired.'
+
+"All the way she kept looking at it, and saying how pretty it was, and
+what beautiful long eyelashes it had, which went against me at the time,
+my daughter, for I knowed it was like its mother.
+
+"The clergyman was a pleasing young gentleman of a genteel appearance,
+with a great deal to say for himself in the way of religion, as was
+right, it being his business. 'Name this child,' says he, and she gives
+a start that nobody sees but myself. So, thinking that the child being
+likely to die, there was no loss in obliging the gentlefolk, says I,
+looking down into the book as if I could read, 'Any name the lady thinks
+suitable for the poor tinker's child;' and says she, the colour coming
+up into her face, 'Call him Christian, for he shall be one.' So he was
+named Christian, a name to give no manner of displeasure to myself or to
+my family; it having been that of my husband's father, who was
+unfortunate in a matter of horse-stealing, and died across the water."
+
+"What did _she_ want with naming the baby, mother?" asked Sybil.
+
+"I comes to that, my daughter, I comes to that, though it's hard to
+speak of. I hate myself worse than I hates the police when I thinks of
+it. But ten pounds--pieces of gold, my daughter, when half-pence were
+hard to come by--and small expectation that he would outlive his mother
+by many days--and a feeling against him then, for her sake, though I
+thinks differently now--"
+
+"You sold him to the clergy-folks?" said Sybil.
+
+"Ten pieces of gold! You never felt the pains of starvation, my
+daughter--nor perhaps those of jealousy, which are worse. The young
+clergywoman had no children, on which score she fretted herself; and
+must have fretted hard, before she begged the poor tinker's child out of
+the woods."
+
+"What did Tinker George say?" asked the girl.
+
+"He used a good deal of bad language, and said I might as easily have
+got twenty pounds as ten, if I had not been as big a fool as the child's
+mother herself. Men are strange creatures, my daughter."
+
+"So you left Christian with them?"
+
+"I did, my daughter. I left him in the arms of the young clergywoman
+with the politest of words on both sides, and a good deal of religious
+conversation from the parson, which I does not doubt was well meant, if
+it was somewhat tedious."
+
+"And then--mother?"
+
+"And then we moved to Banbury, where my son took his second wife, having
+made her acquaintance in an alehouse; and then, my daughter, I begins to
+know that Christian's mother had been a good 'un."
+
+"George isn't as happy with this one, then?"
+
+"Men are curious creatures, my daughter, as you will discover for your
+own part without any instructions from me. He treats her far better than
+the other, because she treats him so much worse. But between them they
+soon put me a-one-side, and when I sat long evenings alone, sometimes in
+a wood, as it might be this, where the branches waves and makes a
+confusion of the shadows--and sometimes on the edge of a Hampshire heath
+where we camps a good deal, and the light is as slow in dying out of the
+bottom of the sky as he and she are in coming home, and the bits of
+water looks as if people had drownded themselves in them--when I sat
+alone, I say, minding the fire and the children--I wondered if Christian
+had lived, till I was all but mad with wondering and coming no nearer to
+knowing.
+
+"'His mother was a good daughter to you,' I thinks; 'and if you hadn't
+sold him--sold your own flesh and blood--for ten golden sovereigns to
+the clergywoman, he might have been a good son to your old age.'
+
+"At last I could bear idleness and the lone company of my own thoughts
+no longer, my daughter, and I sets off to travel on my own account,
+taking money at back-doors, and living on broken meats I begged into the
+bargain, and working at nights instead of thinking. I knows a few arts,
+my daughter, of one sort and another, and I puts away most of what I
+takes, and changes it when the copper comes to silver, and _the silver
+comes to gold_."
+
+"I wonder you never went to see if he was alive," said Sybil.
+
+"I did, my daughter. I went several times under various disguisements,
+which are no difficulty to those who know how to adopt them, and with
+servant's jewellery and children's toys, I had sight of him more than
+once, and each time made me wilder to get him back."
+
+"And you never tried?"
+
+"The money was not ready. One must act honourably, my daughter. I
+couldn't pick up my own grandson as if he'd been a stray hen, or a few
+clothes off the line. It took me five years to save those ten pounds.
+Five long miserable years."
+
+"Miserable!" cried the gipsy girl, flinging her hair back from her eyes.
+"Miserable! Happy, you mean; too happy! It is when one can do nothing--"
+
+She stopped, as if talking choked her, and the old woman, who seemed to
+pay little attention to any one but herself, went on,
+
+"It was when it was all but saved, and I hangs about that country,
+making up my plans, that he comes to me himself, as I sits on the
+outskirts of a wood beyond the village, in no manner of disguisement,
+but just as I sits here."
+
+"He came to you?" said Sybil.
+
+"He comes to me, my daughter; dressed like any young nobleman of eight
+years old, but bareheaded and barefooted, having his cap in one hand,
+and his boots and stockings in the other.
+
+"'Good-morning, old gipsy woman,' says he. 'I heard there was an old
+gipsy woman in the wood; so I came to see. Nurse said if I went about in
+the fields, by myself, the gipsies would steal me; but I told her I
+didn't care if they did, because it must be so nice to live in a wood,
+and sleep out of doors all night. When I grow up, I mean to be a wild
+man on a desert island, and dress in goats' skins. I sha'n't wear
+hats--I hate them; and I don't like shoes and stockings either. When I
+can get away from Nurse, I always take them off. I like to feel what I'm
+walking on, and in the wood I like to scuffle with my toes in the dead
+leaves. There's a quarry at the top of this wood, and I should so have
+liked to have thrown my shoes and stockings and my cap into it; but it
+vexes mother when I destroy my clothes, so I didn't, and I am carrying
+them.'
+
+"Those were the very words he said, my daughter. He had a swiftness of
+tongue, for which I am myself famous, especially in fortune-telling;
+but he used the language of gentility, and a shortness of speech which
+you will observe among those who are accustomed to order what they want
+instead of asking for it. I had hard work to summon voice to reply to
+him, my daughter, and I cannot tell you, nor would you understand it if
+I could find the words, what were my feelings to hear him speak with
+that confidence of the young clergywoman as his mother.
+
+"'A green welcome to the woods and the fields, my noble little
+gentleman,' says I. 'Be pleased to honour the poor tinker-woman by
+accepting the refreshment of a seat and a cup of tea.'
+
+"'I mayn't eat or drink anything when I am visiting the poor people,'
+says he, 'Mother doesn't allow me. But thank you all the same, and
+please don't give me your stool, for I'd much rather sit on the grass;
+and, if you please, I should like you to tell me all about living in
+woods, and making fires, and hanging kettles on sticks, and going about
+the country and sleeping out of doors.'"
+
+"Did you tell him the truth, or make up a tale for him?" asked Sybil.
+
+"Partly one and partly the other, my daughter. But when persons sets
+their minds on anything, they sees the truth in a manner according to
+their own thoughts, which is of itself as good as a made-up tale.
+
+"He asks numberless questions, to which I makes suitable replies. Them
+that lives out of doors--can they get up as early as they likes, without
+being called? he asks.
+
+"Does gipsies go to bed in their clothes?
+
+"Does they sometimes forget their prayers, with not regularly dressing
+and undressing?
+
+"Did I ever sleep on heather?
+
+"Does we ever travel by moonlight?
+
+"Do I see the sun rise every morning?
+
+"Did I ever meet a highwayman?
+
+"Does I believe in ghosts?
+
+"Can I really tell fortunes?
+
+"I takes his shapely little hand--as brown as your own, my daughter, for
+his mother, like myself, was a pure Roman, and looked down upon by her
+people in consequence for marrying my son, who is of mixed blood (my
+husband being in family, as in every other respect, undeserving of the
+slightest mention).
+
+"'Let me tell you your fortune, my noble little gentleman,' I says. 'The
+lines of life are crossed early with those of travelling. Far will you
+wander, and many things will you see. Stone houses and houses of brick
+will not detain you. In the big house with the blue roof and the green
+carpet were you born, and in the big house with the blue roof and the
+green carpet will you die. The big house is delicately perfumed, my
+noble little gentleman, especially in the month of May; at which time
+there is also an abundance of music, and the singers sits overhead. Give
+the old gipsy woman a sight of your comely feet, my little gentleman, by
+the soles of which it is not difficult to see that you were born to
+wander.'
+
+"With this and similar jaw I entertained him, my daughter, and his eyes
+looks up at me out of his face till I feels as if the dead had come
+back; but he had a way with him besides which frightened me, for I knew
+that it came from living with gentlefolk.
+
+"'Are you mighty learned, my dear?' says I. 'Are you well instructed in
+books and schooling?'
+
+"'I can say the English History in verse,' he says, 'and I do compound
+addition; and I know my Catechism, and lots of hymns. Would you like to
+hear me?'
+
+"'If you please, my little gentleman,' I says.
+
+"'What shall I say?' he asks. 'I know all the English History, only I am
+not always quite sure how the kings come; but if you know the kings and
+can just give me the name, I know the verses quite well. And I know the
+Catechism perfectly, but perhaps you don't know the questions without
+the book. The hymns of course you don't want a book for, and I know them
+best of all.'
+
+"'I am not learned, myself,' says I, 'and I only know of two kings--the
+king of England--who, for that matter, is a queen, and a very good
+woman, they say, if one could come at her--and the king of the gipsies,
+who is as big a blackguard as you could desire to know, and by no means
+entitled to call himself king, though he gets a lot of money by it,
+which he spends in the public-house. As regards the other thing, my
+dear, I certainly does not know the questions without the book, nor,
+indeed, should I know them with the book, which is neither here nor
+there; so if the hymns require no learning on my part, I gives the
+preference to them.'
+
+"'I like _them_ best, myself,' he says; and he puts his hat and his
+shoes and stockings on the ground, and stands up and folds his hands
+behind his back, and repeats a large number of religious verses, with
+the same readiness with which the young clergyman speaks out of a book.
+
+"It partly went against me, my daughter, for I am not religious myself,
+and he was always too fond of holy words, which I thinks brings
+ill-luck. But his voice was as sweet as a thrush that sits singing in a
+thorn-bush, and between that and a something in the verses which had a
+tendency to make you feel uncomfortable, I feels more disturbed than I
+cares to show. But oh, my daughter, how I loves him!
+
+"'The blessing of an old gipsy woman on your young head,' I says. 'Fair
+be the skies under which you wanders, and shady the spots in which you
+rests!
+
+"'May the water be clear and the wood dry where you camps!
+
+"'May every road you treads have turf by the wayside, and the
+patteran[B] of a friend on the left.'
+
+"'What is the patteran?' he asks.
+
+"'It is a secret,' I says, looking somewhat sternly at him. 'The roads
+keeps it, and the hedges keeps it--'
+
+"'I can keep it,' he says boldly. 'Pinch my finger, and try me!'
+
+"As he speaks he holds out his little finger, and I pinches it, my
+daughter, till the colour dies out of his lips, though he keeps them
+set, for I delights to see the nobleness and the endurance of him. So I
+explains the patteran to him, and shows him ours with two bits of
+hawthorn laid crosswise, for I does not regard him as a stranger, and I
+sees that he can keep his lips shut when it is required.
+
+"He was practising the patteran at my feet, when I hears the cry of
+'Christian!' and I cannot explain to you the chill that came over my
+heart at the sound.
+
+"Trouble and age and the lone company of your own thoughts, my daughter,
+has a tendency to confuse you; and I am not by any means rightly certain
+at times about things I sees and hears. I sees Christian's mother when
+I knows she can't be there, and though I believes now that only one
+person was calling the child, yet, with the echo that comes from the
+quarry, and with worse than twenty echoes in my own mind, it seems to me
+that the wood is full of voices calling him.
+
+"In my foolishness, my daughter, I sits like a stone, and he springs to
+his feet, and snatches up his things, and says, 'Good-bye, old gipsy
+woman, and thank you very much. I should like to stay with you,' he
+says, 'but Nurse is calling me, and Mother does get so frightened if I
+am long away and she doesn't know where. But I shall come back.'
+
+"I never quite knows, my daughter, whether it was the echo that repeated
+his words, or whether it was my own voice I hears, as I stretches my old
+arms after him, crying, 'Come back!'
+
+"But he runs off shouting, 'Coming, coming!'
+
+"And the wood deafens me, it is so full of voices.
+
+"_Christian! Christian!--Coming! Coming!_
+
+"And I thinks I has some kind of a fit, my daughter, for when I wakes,
+the wood is as still as death, and he is gone, as dreams goes."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+"I really feel for the tinker-mother," whispered Mrs. Hedgehog.
+
+"I feel for her myself," was my reply. "The cares of a family are heavy
+enough when they only last for the season, and one sleeps them off in a
+winter's nap. When--as in the case of men--they last for a lifetime, and
+you never get more than one night's rest at a time, they must be almost
+unendurable. As to prolonging one's anxieties from one's own families to
+the families of each of one's children--no parent in his senses--"
+
+"What is the gipsy girl saying now?" asked Mrs. Hedgehog, who had been
+paying more attention to the women than to my observations--an annoyance
+to which, as head of the family, I have been subjected oftener than is
+becoming.
+
+Sybil had been kneeling at the old woman's feet, soothing her and
+chafing her hands. At last she said,
+
+"But you did get him, Mother. How was it?"
+
+"Not for five more years, my daughter. And never in all that time could
+I get a sight of his face. The very first house I calls at next morning,
+I sees a chalk mark on the gate-post, placed there by some travelling
+tinker or pedler or what not, by which I knows that the neighbourhood is
+being made too hot for tramps and vagrants, as they call us. And go back
+in what disguisement I might, there was no selling a bootlace, nor
+begging a crust of bread there--_there_, where _he_ lived.
+
+"I makes up the ten pounds, and ties it in a bag; but I gets worse and
+worse in health and spirits and in confusion of mind, my daughter; and
+when I comes accidentally across my son in a Bedfordshire lane, and his
+wife is drinking, and he is in much bewilderment with the children, I
+takes up again with them, and I was with them when Christian comes to me
+the second time."
+
+"He came back to you?"
+
+"Learning and the confinement of stone walls, my daughter, than which no
+two things could be more contrary to the nature of those who dwells in
+the woods and lanes. I will not deny that the clergyman--and especially
+the young clergywoman--had been very good to him; but for which he would
+probably have run away long before. But what is bred in the bone comes
+out in the flesh. He does pretty well with the learning, and he bears
+with the confinement of school, though it is worse than that of the
+clergy-house. But when a rumour has crept out that he is not the son of
+the clergyman nor of the clergywoman, and he is taunted with being a
+gipsy and a vagrant, he lays his bare hands on those nearest to him, my
+daughter, and comes away on his bare feet."
+
+"How did he find you, Mother?"
+
+"He has no fixed intentions beyond running away, my daughter; but as he
+is sitting in a hedge to bandage one of his feet with his handkerchief,
+he sees our patteran, and he goes on, keeping it by the left, and sees
+it again, and so follows it, and comes home."
+
+"You mean that he came to you?"
+
+"I do, my dear. For home is not a house that never moves from one place,
+built of stone or brick, and with a front door for the genteel and a
+back door for the common people. If it was so, prisons would be homes.
+But home, my daughter, is where persons is whom you belongs to, and it
+may be under a hedge to-day and in a fair to-morrow."
+
+"Mother," said Sybil, "what did you do about the ten pounds?"
+
+"I will tell you, my daughter. I was obliged to wait longer than was
+agreeable to me before proceeding to that neighbourhood, for the police
+was searching everywhere, and it would be wearisome to relate to you
+with what difficulty Christian was concealed. My plans had been long
+made, as you know.
+
+"Clergyfolk, my daughter, with a tediousness of jaw which makes them as
+oppressive to listen long to as houses is to rest long in, has their
+good points like other persons; they shows kindness to those who are in
+trouble, and they spends their money very freely on the poor. This is
+well known, even by those who has no liking for parsons, and I have more
+than once observed that persons who goes straight to the public-house
+when they has money in their pockets, goes straight to the parson when
+their pockets is empty.
+
+"It is also well known, my daughter, that when the clergyman collects
+money after speaking in his church, he doesn't take it for his own use,
+as is the custom with other people, such as Punch and Judy men, or
+singers, or fortune tellers; at the same time he is as pleased with a
+good collection as if it were for his own use; and if some rich person
+contributes a sovereign for the sick and poor, it is to him as it would
+be to you, my daughter, if your hand was crossed with gold by some noble
+gentleman who had been crossed in love.
+
+"I explain this, my dear, that you may understand how it was that I had
+planned to pay back the clergy people's ten pounds in church, which
+would be as good as paying it into their hands, with the advantage of
+secrecy for myself. On the Saturday I drives into the little market in a
+donkey-cart with greens, and on Sunday morning I goes to church in a
+very respectable disguisement, and the sexton puts me in a pew with
+some women of infirm mind in workhouse dresses, for which, my daughter,
+I had much to do to restrain myself from knocking him down. But I does;
+and I behaves myself through the service with the utmost care, following
+the movements of the genteeler portion of the company, those in the pew
+with me having no manners at all; one of them standing most of the time
+and giggling over the pew-back, and another sitting in the corner and
+weeping into her lap.
+
+"But with the exception of getting up and sitting down, and holding a
+book open as near to the middle as I could guess, I pays little
+attention, my daughter, for all my thoughts is taken up with waiting for
+the collection to begin, and with trying to keep my eyes from the
+clergywoman's face, which I can see quite clearly, though she is at some
+distance from me."
+
+"Did she look very wild, Mother, as if she felt beside herself?"
+
+"She looked very bad, my daughter, and grey, which was not with age. I
+tells you that I tried not to look at her; and by and by the collection
+begins.
+
+"It seems hours to me, my daughter, whilst the money is chinking and the
+clergyman is speaking, and the ten pieces of gold is getting so hot in
+my hands, I fancies they burns me, and still not one of the
+collecting-men comes near our pew.
+
+"At last, one by one, they begins to go past me and go up to the
+clergyman who is waiting for them at the upper end, and then I perceives
+that they regards us as too poor to pay our way like the rest, and that
+the plates will never be put into our pew at all. So when the last but
+one is going past me, I puts out my hand to beckon him, and the woman
+that is standing by me bursts out laughing, and the other cries worse
+than ever, and the collecting-man says, 'Hush! hush!' and goes past and
+takes the plate with him.
+
+"'A black curse on your insolence!' says I; and then I grips the
+laughing woman by the arm and whispers, 'If you make that noise again,
+I'll break your head,' and she sits down and begins to cry like the
+other.
+
+"There is one more collecting-man, who comes last, and he is the Duke,
+who lives at the big house.
+
+"The nobility and gentry, my daughter, when they are the real thing,
+has, like the real Romans, a quickness to catch your meaning, and a
+politeness of manner which you doesn't meet with among such people as
+the keeper of a small shop or the master of a workhouse. The Duke was a
+very old man, with bent shoulders and the slow step of age, and I thinks
+he did not see or hear very quickly; and when I beckons to him he goes
+past. But when he is some way past he looks back. And when he sees my
+hand out, he turns and comes slowly down again, and hands me the plate
+with as much politeness as if I had been in his own pew, and he says in
+a low voice, 'I beg your pardon.'
+
+"But when I sees him stumbling back, and knows that in his politeness he
+will bring me the plate, there comes a fear on me, my daughter, that he
+may see the ten pieces of gold and think I has stolen them. And then I
+knows not what I shall do, for the nobility and gentry, though quick and
+polite in a matter of obliging the poor, such as this one,--when they
+sits as poknees[C] to administer justice, loses both their good sense
+and their good manners as completely as any of the police.
+
+"But it comes to me also that being such a real one--such an
+out-and-outer--his politeness may be so great that he may look another
+way, rather than peep and pry to see what the poor workhouse-company
+woman puts into the plate. And I am right, my daughter, for he looks
+away, and I lays the ten golden sovereigns in the plate, and he gives a
+little smile and a little bow, and goes slowly and stumblingly to the
+upper end, where the clergyman is still speaking verses.
+
+"And then, my daughter, my hands, which made the gold sovereigns so
+hot, turns very hot, and I gets up and goes out of the church with as
+much respectfulness and quiet as I am able.
+
+"And I tries not to look at her face as I turns to shut the door, but I
+was unable to keep myself from doing so, and as it looked then I can see
+it now, my dear, and I know I shall remember it till I die. I thinks
+somehow that she was praying, though it was not a praying part of the
+service, and when I looks to the upper end I sees that the eyes of the
+young clergyman her husband is fixed on her, as mine is.
+
+"And of all the words which he preached that day and the verses he spoke
+with so much readiness, I could not repeat one to you, my daughter, to
+save my life, except the words he was saying just then, and they remains
+in my ears as her face remains before my eyes,--
+
+"'GOD is not unrighteous, that He will forget your work, and
+labour which proceedeth of love.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+"We are all creatures of habit." So my learned uncle, Draen y Coed, who
+was a Welsh hedgehog, used to say. "Which was why an ancestor of my own,
+who acted as turnspit in the kitchen of a farmhouse in Yorkshire, quite
+abandoned the family custom of walking out in the cool of the evening,
+and declared that he couldn't take two steps in comfort except in a
+circle, and in front of a kitchen-fire at roasting heat."
+
+Uncle Draen y Coed was right, and I must add that I doubt if, in all his
+experience, or among the strange traditions of his most eccentric
+ancestors, he could find an instance of change of habits so unexpected,
+so complete, I may say so headlong, as when very quiet people, with an
+almost surly attachment to home, break the bounds of the domestic
+circle, and take to gadding, gossiping, and excitement.
+
+Perhaps it is because they find that their fellow-creatures are nicer
+than they have been wont to allow them to be, and that other people's
+affairs are quite as interesting as their own.
+
+Perhaps--but what is the good of trying to explain infatuations?
+
+Why do we all love valerian? I can only record that, having set up every
+prickle on our backs against intruders into our wood, we now dreaded
+nothing more than that our neighbours should forsake us, and wished for
+nothing better than for fresh arrivals.
+
+In old days, when my excellent partner and I used to take our evening
+stroll up the field, we were wont to regard it quite as a grievance if a
+cousin, who lived at the far end of the hedge, came out and caught us
+and detained us for a gossip. But now I could hardly settle to my midday
+nap for thinking of the tinker-mother; and as to Mrs. Hedgehog, she
+almost annoyed me by her anxiety to see Christian. However, curiosity is
+the foible of her sex, and I accompanied her daily to the encampment
+without a murmur.
+
+The seven urchins we sent down to the burdocks to pick snails.
+
+It was not many days after that on which we heard the old tinker-mother
+relate Christian's history, that we were stopped on our way to the
+corner where we usually concealed ourselves, by hearing strange voices
+from the winding pathway above us.
+
+"It's a young man," said I.
+
+"It's Christian!" cried Mrs. Hedgehog.
+
+"I feel sure that it is not," said I; "but if you will keep quiet, I
+will creep a little forward and see."
+
+I am always in the right, as I make a point of reminding Mrs. Hedgehog
+whenever we dispute; and I was right on this occasion.
+
+The lad who spoke was a young gentleman of about seventeen, and no more
+like a gipsy than I am. His fair hair was closely cropped, his eyes were
+quick and bright, his manner was alert and almost anxious, and though he
+was very slight as well as very young, he carried himself with dignity
+and some little importance. A lady, much older than himself, was with
+him, whom he was helping down the path.
+
+"Take care, Gertrude, take care. There is no hurry, and I believe
+there's no one in the wood but ourselves."
+
+"The people at the inn told us that there were gipsies in the
+neighbourhood," said the lady; "and oh, Ted! this is exactly the wood I
+dreamt of, except the purple and white--"
+
+"Gertrude! What on earth are you after?"
+
+"The flowers, Ted, the flowers in my dream! There they are, a perfect
+carpet of them. White--oh, how lovely!--and there, on the other side,
+are the purple ones. What are they, dear? I know you are a good
+botanist. He always raved about your collection."
+
+"Nonsense, I'm not a botanist. Several other fellows went in for it when
+the prize was offered, and all that my collection was good for was his
+doing. I never did see any one arrange flowers as he did, I must say.
+Every specimen was pressed so as somehow to keep its own way of growing.
+And when I did them, a columbine looked as stiff as a dog-daisy. I never
+could keep any character in them. Watson--the fellow who drew so
+well--made vignettes on the blank pages to lots of the specimens--'Likely
+Habitats' we called them. He used to sit with his paint-box in my
+window, and Christian used to sit outside the window, on the edge,
+dangling his legs, and describing scenes out of his head for Watson to
+draw. Watson used to say, 'I wish I could paint with my brush as that
+fellow paints with his tongue'--and when the vignettes were admired,
+I've heard him say, in his dry way, 'I copied them from Christian's
+paintings;' and the fellows used to stare, for you know he couldn't
+draw a line. And when--But I say, Gertrude, for Heaven's sake, don't
+devour everything I say with those great pitiful eyes of yours. I am a
+regular brute to talk about him."
+
+"No, Ted, no. It makes me so happy to hear you, and to know that you
+know how good he really was, and how much he must have been aggravated
+before--"
+
+"For goodness' sake, don't cry. Christian was a very good fellow, a
+capital fellow. I never thought I could have got on so well with any one
+who was--I mean who wasn't--well, of course I mean who was really a
+gipsy. I don't blame him a bit for resenting being bullied about his
+parents. I only blame myself for not looking better after him. But you
+know that well enough--you know it's because I never can forgive myself
+for having managed so badly when you put him in my care, that I am
+backing you through this mad expedition, though I don't approve of it
+one bit, and though I know John will blame me awfully."
+
+("It's the clergywoman," whispered Mrs. Hedgehog excitedly, "and I must
+and will see her."
+
+When it comes to this with Mrs. Hedgehog's sex, there is nothing for it
+but to let the dear creatures have their own way, and take the
+consequences. She pushed her nose straight through the lower branches of
+an arbutus in which we were concealed, and I myself managed to get a
+nearer sight of our new neighbours.
+
+As we crept forward, the clergywoman got up from where she was kneeling
+amongst the flowers, and laid her hand on the young gentleman's arm. I
+noticed it because I had never seen such a white hand before; Sybil's
+paws were nearly as dark as my own.)
+
+"John will blame no one if we find Christian," she said. "You are very,
+very good, Cousin Ted, to come with me and help me when you do not
+believe in my dream. But you must say it is odd about the flowers. And
+you haven't told me yet what they are."
+
+"It is the bulbous-rooted fumitory," said the young man, pulling a piece
+at random in the reckless way in which men do disfigure forest
+flower-beds. "It isn't strictly indigenous, but it is naturalized in
+many places, and you must have seen it before, though you fancy you
+haven't."
+
+"I have seen it once before," she said earnestly--"all in delicate
+glaucous-green masses, studded with purple and white, like these; but it
+was in my dream. I never saw it otherwise, though I know you don't
+believe me."
+
+"Dear Gertrude, I'll believe anything you like to tell me, if you'll
+come home. I'm sure I have done very wrong. You know I'm always hard up,
+but I declare I'd give a hundred pounds if you'd come home with me at
+once. I don't believe there's a gipsy within--"
+
+"Good-day, my pretty young gentleman. Let the poor gipsy girl tell you
+your fortune."
+
+He turned round and saw Sybil standing at his elbow, her eyes flashing
+and her white teeth gleaming in a broad smile. He stood speechless in
+sudden surprise; but the clergywoman, who was not surprised, came
+forward with her white hands stretched so expressively towards Sybil's
+brown ones, that the gipsy girl all but took them in her own.
+
+"Please kindly tell me--do you know anything of a young gipsy, named
+Christian?"
+
+The clergywoman spoke with such vehemence that Sybil answered directly,
+"I know his grandmother"--and then suddenly stopped herself.
+
+But as she spoke, she had turned her head with an expressive gesture in
+the direction of the encampment, and without waiting for more, the
+clergywoman ran down the path, calling on her cousin to follow her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+My ancestor's artifice was very successful when the race was run on two
+sides of a hedge, backwards and forwards; but if a louis d'or and a
+bottle of brandy had depended on my reaching the tinker-mother before
+the clergywoman, I should have lost the wager. We hurried after her,
+however, as fast as we were able, keeping well under the brushwood.
+
+When we could see our neighbours again, the tinker-mother was standing
+up, and speaking hurriedly, with a wild look in her eyes.
+
+"Let me be, Sybil Stanley, and let me speak. I says again, what has fine
+folk to do with coming and worriting us in our wood? If I did sell him,
+I sold him fair--and if I got him back, I bought him back fair. Aye my
+delicate gentlewoman, you may look at me, but I did!
+
+"Five years, five years of wind and weather, and hard days and lonely
+nights:--
+
+"Five years of food your men would chuck to the pigs, and of clothes
+your maids would think scorn to scour in:--
+
+"Five years--but I scraped it together, and _then_ they baulked me. You
+shuts the door in the poor tinker-woman's face; you gives the words of
+warning to the police.
+
+"Five more years--it was five more, wasn't it, my daughter?--Sometimes I
+fancies I makes a mistake and overcounts. But, _he'll_ know. Christian,
+my dear! Christian, I say!"
+
+"Sit down, Mother, sit down," said the gipsy girl; and the old woman sat
+down, but she went on muttering,--
+
+"I will speak! What has they to do, I say, to ask me where he has gone
+to? A fine place for the fine gentleman they made of him. What has such
+as them to say to it, if I couldn't keep him when I got him--that they
+comes to taunt me and my grey hairs?"
+
+She wrung her grey locks with a passionate gesture as she spoke, and
+then dropped her elbows on her knees and her head upon her hands.
+
+The clergywoman had been standing very still, with her two white hands
+folded before her, and her eyes, that had dark circles round them which
+made them look large, fixed upon the tinker-mother, as she muttered;
+but when she ceased muttering the clergywoman unlocked her hands, and
+with one movement took off her hat. Her hair was smoothly drawn over the
+roundness of her head, and gathered in a knot at the back of her neck,
+and the brown of it was all streaked with grey. She threw her hat on to
+the grass, and moving swiftly to the old woman's side, she knelt by her,
+as we had seen Sybil kneel, speaking very clearly, and, touching the
+tinker-mother's hand.
+
+"Christian's grandmother--you are his grandmother, are you not?--you
+must be much, much older than me, but look at _my_ hair. Am I likely to
+taunt any one with having grown grey or with being miserable? It takes a
+good deal of pain, good mother, to make young hair as white as mine."
+
+"So it should," muttered the old woman, "so it should. It is a plaguy
+world, I say, as it is; but it would be plaguy past any bearing for the
+poor, if them that has everything could do just as they likes and never
+feel no aches nor pains afterwards. And there's a many fine gentlefolk
+thinks they can, till they feels the difference.
+
+"'What's ten pound to me?' says you. 'I wants the pretty baby with the
+dark eyes and the long lashes,' says you.
+
+"'Them it belongs to is poor, they'd sell anything,' says you.
+
+"'I wants a son,' you says; 'and having the advantages of gold and
+silver, I can buy one.'
+
+"You calls him by a name of your own choosing, and puts your own name at
+the end of that. His hands are something dark for the son of such a
+delicate white lady-mother, but they can be covered with the kid gloves
+of gentility.
+
+"You buys fine clothes for him, and nurses and tutors and schools for
+him.
+
+"You teaches him the speech of gentlefolk, and the airs of gentlefolk,
+and the learning of gentlefolk.
+
+"You crams his head with religion, which is a thing I doesn't hold with,
+and with holy words, which I thinks brings ill-luck.
+
+"You has the advantages of silver and gold, to make a fine gentleman of
+him, but the blood that flies to his face when he hears the words of
+insult is gipsy blood, and he comes back to the woods where he was born.
+
+"Let me be, my daughter, I say I will speak--(Heaven keep my head
+cool!)--it's good for such as them to hear the truth once in a way.
+She's a dainty fine lady, and she taught him many fine things, besides
+religion, which I sets my face against. Tell her she took mighty good
+care of him--Ha! ha! the old tinker-woman had only one chance of
+teaching him anything--_but she taught him the patteran_!"
+
+The clergywoman had never moved, except that when the tinker-mother
+shook off her hand she locked her white fingers in front of her as
+before, and her eyes wandered from the old woman's face, and looked
+beyond it, as if she were doing what I have often done, and counting the
+bits of blue sky which show through the oak-leaves before they grow
+thick. But she must have been paying attention all the same, for she
+spoke very earnestly.
+
+"Good mother, listen to me. If I bought him, you sold him. Perhaps I did
+wrong to tempt you--perhaps I did wrong to hope to buy for myself what
+GOD was not pleased to give me. I was very young, and one makes
+many mistakes when one is young. I thought I was childless and unhappy,
+but I know now that only those are childless who have had children and
+lost them.
+
+"Do you know that in all the years my son was with me, I do not think
+there was a day when I did not think of you? I used to wonder if you
+regretted him, and I lived in dread of your getting him back; and when
+he ran away, I knew you had. I never agreed with the lawyer's plans--my
+husband will tell you so--I always wanted to find you to speak to you
+myself. I knew what you must feel, and I thought I should like you to
+know that I knew it.
+
+"Night after night I lay awake and thought what I would say to you when
+we met. I thought I would tell you that I could quite understand that
+our ways might become irksome to Christian, if he inherited a love for
+outdoor life, and for moving from place to place. I thought I would say
+that perhaps I was wrong ever to have taken him away from his own
+people; but as it was done and could not be undone, we might perhaps
+make the best of it together. I hope you understand me, though you say
+nothing? You see, if he is a gipsy at heart, he has also been brought up
+to many comforts you cannot give him, and with the habits and ideas of a
+gentleman. You are too clever, and too fond of him, to mind my speaking
+plainly. Now there are things which a gentleman might do if he had the
+money, which would satisfy his love of roving as well. Many rich
+gentlemen dislike the confinement of houses and domestic ways as much as
+Christian, and they leave their fine homes to travel among dangers and
+discomforts. I could find the money for Christian to do this by and by.
+If he likes a wandering life, he can live it easily so--only he would be
+able to wander hundreds of miles where you wander one, and to sleep
+under other skies and among new flowers, and in forests to which such
+woods as these are shrubberies. He need not fall into any of the bad
+ways to which you know people are tempted by being poor. I have thought
+of it all, night after night, and longed to be able to tell you about
+it. He might become a famous traveller, you know; he is very clever and
+very fond of books of adventure. This young gentleman will tell you so.
+How proud we should both be of him! That is what I have thought might be
+if you did not hide him from me, and I did not keep him from you.
+
+"And as to religion--dear good mother, listen to me. Look at me--see if
+religion has been a fashion or a plaything to _me_. If it had not stood
+by me when my heart was as heavy as yours, what profit should I have in
+it?
+
+"Christian's grandmother--you are his grandmother, I know, and have the
+better right to him--if you cannot agree to my plans--if you won't let
+me help you about him--if you hide him from me, and I must live out my
+life and never see his dear face again--spare me the hope of seeing it
+when this life is over.
+
+"If I did my best for your grandson--and you know I did--oh! for the
+love of Christ, our only Refuge, do not stand between him and the Father
+of us all!
+
+"If you have felt what he must suffer if he is poor, and if you know so
+well how little it makes sure of happiness to be rich--if in a long life
+you have found out how hard it is to be good, and how rare it is to be
+happy--if you know what it is to love and lose, to hope and to be
+disappointed in one's hoping--let him be religious, good mother!
+
+"If you care for Christian, leave him the only strength that is strong
+enough to hold us back from sin, and to do instead of joy."
+
+The tinker-mother lifted her head; but before she could say a word, the
+young gentleman burst into indignant speech.
+
+"Gertrude, I can bear it no longer. Not even for you, not even for the
+chance of getting Christian back. It's empty swagger to say that I wish
+to GOD I'd the chance of giving my life to get him back for
+you. But you must come home now. I've bitten my lip through in holding
+my tongue, but I won't see you kneel another minute at the feet of that
+sulky old gipsy hag."
+
+Whilst he was speaking the tinker-mother had risen to her feet, and when
+she stood quite upright she was much taller than I had thought. The
+young gentleman had moved to take his cousin by the hand, but the old
+woman waved him back.
+
+"Stay where you are, young gentleman," she said. "This is no matter for
+boys to mix and meddle in. Sybil, my daughter--Sybil, I say! Come and
+stand near me, for I gets confused at times, and I fears I may not
+explain myself to the noble gentlewoman with all the respect that I
+could wish. She says a great deal that is very true, my daughter, and
+she has no vulgar insolence in her manners of speaking. I thinks I shall
+let her do as she says, if we can get Christian out, which perhaps, if
+she is cousin to any of the justiciary, she may be able to do.
+
+"The poor tinker-folk returns you the deepest of obligations, my gentle
+lady. If she'll let me see him when I wants to, it will be best, my
+daughter; for I thinks I am failing, and I shouldn't like to leave him
+with George and that drunken slut.
+
+"I thinks I am failing, I say. Trouble and age and the lone company of
+your own thoughts, my noble gentlewoman, has a tendency to confuse you,
+though I was always highly esteemed for the facility of my speech,
+especially in the telling of fortunes.
+
+"Let the poor gipsy look into your white hand, my pretty lady. The lines
+of life are somewhat broken with trouble, but they joins in peace.
+There's a dark young gentleman with a great influence on your happiness,
+and I sees grandchildren gathered at your knees.
+
+"What did the lady snatch away her hand for, my daughter? I means no
+offence. She shall have Christian. I have told her so. Tell him to get
+ready and go before his father gets back. He's a bad 'un is my son
+George, and I knows now that she was far too good for him.
+
+"Come a little nearer, my dear, that I may touch you. I sees your face
+so often, when I knows you can't be there, that it pleases me to be able
+to feel you. I was afraid you bore me ill-will for selling Christian;
+but I bought him back, my dear, I bought him back. Take him away with
+you, my dear, for I am failing, and I shouldn't like to leave him with
+George. Your eyes looks very hollow and your hair is grey. Not, that I
+begrudges your making so much of my son, but he treats you ill, he
+treats you very ill. Don't cry, my dear, it comes to an end at last,
+though I thinks sometimes that all the men in the world put together is
+not worth the love we wastes upon one. You hear what I say, Sybil? And
+that rascal, Black Basil, is the worst of a bad lot."
+
+"Hold your jaw, Mother," said Sybil sharply; and she added, "Be pleased
+to excuse her, my lady: she is old and gets confused at times, and she
+thinks you are Christian's mother, who is dead."
+
+The old woman was bursting out again, when Sybil raised her hand, and we
+all pricked our ears at a sound of noisy quarrelling that came nearer.
+
+"It's George and his wife," said Sybil. "Mother, the gentlefolks had
+better go. I'll go to the inn afterwards, and tell them about Christian.
+Take the lady away, sir. Come, Mother, come!"
+
+I've a horror of gipsy men, and even before our neighbours had
+dispersed I hustled away with Mrs. Hedgehog into the bushes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+Good Mrs. Hedgehog hurt one of her feet slightly in our hurried retreat,
+and next day was obliged to rest it; but as our curiosity was more on
+the alert than ever, I went down in the afternoon to the tinker camp.
+
+The old woman was sitting in her usual position, and she seemed to have
+recovered herself. Sybil was leaning back against a tree opposite; she
+wore a hat and shawl, and looked almost as wild as the tinker-mother had
+looked the day before. She seemed to have been at the inn with the
+clergywoman, and was telling the tinker-mother the result.
+
+"You told her he had got two years, my daughter? Does she say she will
+get him out?"
+
+"She says she has no more power to do it than yourself, Mother--and the
+young gentleman says the same--unless--unless it was made known that
+Christian was innocent."
+
+"Two years," moaned the old woman. "Is she sure we couldn't buy him out,
+my dear? Two years--oh! Christian, my child, I shall never live to see
+you again!"
+
+She sobbed for a minute, and then raising her hand suddenly above her
+head, she cried, "A curse on Black--" but Sybil seized her by the wrist
+so suddenly, that it checked her words.
+
+"Don't curse him, Mother," said the gipsy girl, "and I'll--I'll see what
+I can do. I meant to, and I've come to say good-bye. I've brought a
+packet of tea for you; see that you keep it to yourself. Good-bye,
+Mother."
+
+"Good-evening, my daughter."
+
+"I said good-bye. You don't hold with religion, do you?"
+
+"I does not, so far, my daughter; though I think the young clergywoman
+speaks very convincingly about it."
+
+"Don't you think that there may be a better world, Mother, for them that
+tries to do right, though things goes against them here?"
+
+"I think there might very easily be a better world, my dear, but I never
+was instructed about it."
+
+"You don't believe in prayers, do you, Mother?"
+
+"That I does not, my daughter. Christian said lots of 'em, and you sees
+what it comes to."
+
+"It's not unlucky to say 'GOD bless you,' is it, Mother? I
+wanted you to say it before I go."
+
+"No, my daughter, I doesn't object to that, for I regards it as an
+old-fashioned compliment, more in the nature of good manners than of
+holy words."
+
+"GOD bless you, Mother."
+
+"GOD bless you, my daughter."
+
+Sybil turned round and walked steadily away. The last glimpse I had of
+her was when she turned once more, and put the hair from her face to
+look at the old woman: but the tinker-mother did not see her, for she
+was muttering with her head upon her hands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a remarkable summer--that summer when I had seven, and when we
+took so much interest in our neighbours.
+
+I make a point of never disturbing myself about the events of by-gone
+seasons. At the same time, to rear a family of seven urchins is not a
+thing done by hedgehog-parents every year, and the careers of that
+family are very clearly impressed upon my memory.
+
+Number one came to a sad end.
+
+What on the face of the wood made him think of pheasants' eggs, I cannot
+conceive. I'm sure I never said anything about them! It was whilst he
+was scrambling along the edge of the covert, that he met the Fox, and
+very properly rolled himself into a ball. The Fox's nose was as long as
+his own, and he rolled my poor son over and over with it, till he
+rolled him into the stream. The young urchins swim like fishes, but just
+as he was scrambling to shore, the Fox caught him by the waistcoat and
+killed him. I do hate slyness!
+
+Numbers two and three were flitted. I told them so, but young people
+will go their own way. They had excellent victuals.
+
+Number four (my eldest daughter) settled very comfortably in life, and
+had a family of three. She might have sent them down to the burdocks to
+pick snails quite well, but she would take them out walking with her
+instead. They were picked up (all four of them) by two long-legged Irish
+boys, who put them into a basket and took them home. I do not think the
+young gentlemen meant any harm, for they provided plenty of food, and
+took them to bed with them. They set my daughter at liberty next day,
+and she spoke very handsomely of the young gentlemen, and said they had
+cured the skins with saltpetre, and were stuffing them when she left.
+But the subject was always an awkward one.
+
+Number five is still living. He is the best hand at a fight with a snake
+that I know.
+
+Numbers six and seven went to Covent Garden in a hamper. They say
+black-beetles are excellent eating.
+
+The whole seven had a narrow escape with their lives just after Sybil
+left us. They over-ate themselves on snails, and Mrs. Hedgehog had to
+stay at home and nurse them. I kept my eye on our neighbours and brought
+her the news.
+
+"Christian has come home," I said, one day. "The Queen has given him a
+pardon."
+
+"Then he _did_ take the pheasants' eggs?" said Mrs. Hedgehog.
+
+"Certainly not," said I. "In the first place it wasn't eggs, and in the
+second place it was Black Basil who took whatever it was, and he has
+confessed to it."
+
+"Then if Christian didn't do it, how is it that he has been forgiven?"
+said Mrs. Hedgehog.
+
+"I can't tell you," said I; "but so it is. And he is at this moment with
+the clergywoman and the tinker-mother."
+
+"Where is Sybil?" asked Mrs. Hedgehog.
+
+I did not know then, and I am not very clear about her now. I never saw
+her again, but either I heard that she had married Black Basil, and that
+they had gone across the water to some country where the woods are
+bigger than they are here, or I have dreamt it in one of my winter naps.
+
+I am inclined to think it must be true, because I always regarded Sybil
+as somewhat proud and unsociable, and I think she would like a big wood
+and very few neighbours.
+
+But really when one sleeps for several months at a stretch it is not
+very easy to be accurate about one's dreams.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+Footnote B: _Patteran_ = the gipsy "trail."
+
+Footnote C: "Poknees," gipsy word for magistrate.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TOOTS AND BOOTS.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+My name is Toots. Why, I have not the slightest idea. But I suppose very
+few people--cats or otherwise--are consulted about their own names. If
+they were, these would perhaps be, as a rule, more appropriate.
+
+What qualities of mind or body my name was supposed to illustrate, I
+have not to this hour a notion. I distinctly remember the stage of my
+kittenhood, when I thought that Toots was the English for cream.
+
+"Toots! Toots!" my young mistress used to say, in the most suggestive
+tones, creeping after me as I would creep after a mouse, with a
+saucerful of that delicious liquid in her hand.
+
+"Toots is first-rate stuff," I used to think, and I purred accordingly,
+for I never was an ungrateful cat.
+
+This was in the dining-room, and in the morning. Later in the day,
+"Toots" was served in the drawing-room. It was between these two
+periods, I remember, that one day I found myself in the larder. Why I
+went there, puzzled me at the time; for if there is anything I hate it
+is a chill, and there was a horrid draught through a window pierced with
+tiny holes, which seemed to let in a separate blast for every hair of
+one's fur. I followed the cook, it is true; but I did not follow the
+cook as a rule--not, for instance, when she went out to the coal-hole in
+the yard. I had slipped in under her dress. I was behind the potato-tub
+when she went out, shutting the door after her. For some mysterious
+reason I felt on the tip-claw of expectation. My nose twitched with
+agreeable sensations. An inward voice seemed to murmur, _Toots_!
+Regardless of the draughts, I sprang on to the shelf close under the
+window. And there was such a dish of cream! The saucers in which one got
+it at breakfast did not hold a twentieth part of what this brimming pan
+contained. As to the five o'clock china, in which visitors give you a
+tepid teaspoonful, with bits of old tea-leaves in it--I grinned at the
+thought as I drew in tongueful after tongueful of the thick yellow
+cream.
+
+At this moment I heard my young mistress's voice in the distant
+passages.
+
+"Toots, Toots!" said she.
+
+"I've got plenty," purred I, lifting my head to speak, by a great
+effort.
+
+"Toots, Toots!" she miowed on, for she wasn't much quicker-witted than
+the rest of her race.
+
+"No, thank you," thought I; "and if you want five o'clock toots for
+yourself, I advise you to come here for it." I thought this, but speak I
+really could not--I was too busy lapping.
+
+It was delicious stuff! But when the dish was about three-parts empty, I
+began to feel as if I had had a good deal, and to wish I had more
+appetite for the rest. "It's a shame to leave it, though," I thought,
+"when a few more laps will empty the dish." For I come of an ancient and
+rough-tongued cat family, who always lick their platters clean. So I set
+to work again, though the draught was most annoying, and froze the cream
+to butter on my whiskers.
+
+I was polishing the glazed earthenware with the family skill, when I
+became conscious that the house was resounding to the cry of "Toots!"
+
+"Toots, Toots!" squeaked the housemaid, in the servants' hall.
+
+"Toots, Toots!" growled the elderly butler, in the pantry.
+
+"Toots, Toots, cock-a-Toots!" yelled that intolerable creature, the
+Macaw.
+
+"Toots, Toots!" snapped the cook.
+
+"Miow," said I; for I had finished the cream, and could speak now,
+though I confess I did not feel equal to any great exertion.
+
+The cook opened the door. She found me--she did not find the cream,
+which she had left in the dish ready for whipping.
+
+Perhaps it was because she had no cream to whip, that she tried to whip
+me. Certainly, during the next half-hour, I had reason to be much
+confused as to the meaning of the word "Toots." In the soft voice of my
+mistress it had always seemed to me to mean cream; now it seemed to mean
+kicks, blows, flapping dish-cloths, wash-leathers and dusters, pokers,
+carpet brooms, and every instrument of torture with which a poor cat
+could be chased from garret to cellar. I am pretty nimble, and though I
+never felt less disposed for violent exercise, I flatter myself I led
+them a good dance before, by a sudden impulse of affectionate
+trustfulness, I sprang straight into my mistress's arms for shelter.
+
+"You must beat him, miss," gasped the cook, "or there'll never be no
+bearing him in the house. Every drop of that lovely cream gone, and half
+the sweets for the ball supper throwed completely out of calculation!"
+
+"Naughty Toots, naughty Toots, naughty Toots!" cried the young lady,
+and with every "Toots" she gave me a slap; but as her paws had no claws
+in them, I was more offended than hurt.
+
+This was my first lesson in honesty, and it was also the beginning of
+that train of reasoning in my own mind, by which I came to understand
+that when people called "Toots" they meant me. And as--to do them
+justice--they generally called me with some kind intention, I made a
+point of responding to my name.
+
+Indeed, they were so kind to me, and my position was such a very
+comfortable one, that when a lean tabby called one day for a charitable
+subscription, and begged me to contribute a few spare partridge bones to
+a fund for the support of starving cats in the neighbourhood, who had
+been deserted by families leaving town, I said that really such cases
+were not much in my line. There is a great deal of imposition
+about--perhaps the cats had stolen the cream, and hadn't left off
+stealing it when they were chased by the family. I doubted if families
+where the cats deserved respect and consideration ever did leave town.
+One has so many calls, if one once begins to subscribe to things; and I
+am particularly fond of partridge.
+
+But when, a few months later, the very words which the lean tabby had
+spoken passed between the butler and the cook in reference to our own
+household, and I learnt that "the family" were going "to leave town," I
+felt a pang of conscience, and wished I had subscribed the merry
+thought, or even the breast-bone--there was very little on it--to the
+Deserted Cats' Fund.
+
+But it was my young mistress who told me (with regrets and caresses,
+which in the circumstances were mere mockery) that I was to be left
+behind.
+
+I have a particularly placid temper, and can adapt myself pretty
+comfortably to the ups and downs of life; but this news made my tail
+stand on end.
+
+"Poor dear Toots!" said my mistress, kissing my nose, and tickling me
+gently under the ear, as if she were saying the prettiest things
+possible. "I am _so_ sorry! I don't know _what_ we are to do with you!
+But we are going abroad, and we _can't_ take you, you dear old thing!
+We've such heaps of luggage, and such lots of servants, and no end of
+things that _must_ go! But I _can't bear to think_ of you left behind!"
+
+"No," said I indignantly; "that's just it, and the people at number ten,
+and number fourteen, and number twenty-five, couldn't bear to think what
+would become of their cats, so they went away and didn't think about it.
+They couldn't bear to see them die, so they didn't give them a dose of
+quick poison, but left them to die of starvation, when they weren't
+there to see. You're a heartless, selfish race, you human beings, and I
+suspect that Mrs. Tabby is not the only shabby-looking, true-hearted
+soul, who has to pester people for subscriptions to patch up the dreary
+end of existence for deserted pets, when caressing days are over. Fuff!"
+
+And I jumped straight out of her arms, and whisked through the
+dining-room window. For some time I strolled thoughtfully along the top
+of the area railings. I rather hoped I might see Mrs. Tabby. I wondered
+how her subscription list was getting on. I felt all the difference
+between a lady's interest in a Reduced Gentlewomen's Benevolent
+Institution or a Poor Annuitants' Home, when she is well and wealthy,
+and the same lady's interest when some turn of Misfortune's wheel has
+left her "dependent on her own exertions." It seemed that I was to be
+left dependent on my own exertions--and my thoughts turned naturally to
+Mrs. Tabby and the Deserted Cats' Fund.
+
+But not a sign of the good creature! At this moment a hansom cab rattled
+up, and a gentleman got out and rang our front-door bell. As he got out
+of the cab, I jumped down from the railings, and rubbed against his
+legs--he had very long legs.
+
+"Halloa, Toots! is that you?" said he in a kindly voice, which had
+always had attractions for me, and which in my present mood was
+particularly grateful. His hat was set well on the back of his head, and
+I could clearly see the friendly expression of his countenance. Suddenly
+he tilted it over his nose, which I have observed that he is apt to do
+when struck by a new idea. "Toots!" said he abruptly, "what are they
+going to do with you?"
+
+Blessings on this kind of friend! say I; the friend who will encumber
+himself with the responsibility of thinking what's to become of you,
+when you are down in the world. Those tender-hearted souls who can't
+bear to think of your misfortunes are a much more numerous part of one's
+acquaintance.
+
+A ray of hope began to dawn upon me. Perhaps a new and an even more
+luxurious home was to be offered for my acceptance. In what foolish
+panic had I begun to identify myself with the needy classes of society?
+A cat of my stripes and style! Once more I thought of benevolent
+institutions from a patronizing point of view. But I would be a patron,
+and a generous one. The shock _had_ done so much! And the next time Mrs.
+Tabby called I would _pick out a lot of my best bones for the Fund_.
+
+Meanwhile, I went back to the railings, and from these took a flying
+leap, and perched myself on the gentleman's shoulder. I could hardly
+have managed it from the ground, he had such very long legs.
+
+I think, by the bye, that I have mentioned this before. I do not wish to
+repeat myself, or to dwell on my grievance, though, if his legs had been
+shorter, his riding-boots would not have been so long, and I might at
+this moment know what became of--but I must not forestall my story.
+
+I jumped on to the gentleman's shoulder. In doing so, I knocked his hat
+over one eye. But I have seen it so since then, and he made no
+complaint. The man-servant opened the door, and we went into the house
+together.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+I flatter myself that my head is not remarkable for size and beauty
+alone. I am a cat of mind, and I made it up at once as to the course of
+conduct to pursue.
+
+I am also a cat with some powers of observation, and I have observed
+that two things go a long way with men--flattery and persistence. Also
+that the difficulty of coaxing them is not in direct proportion to their
+size--rather the reverse. Another thing that I have observed is, that
+if you want to be well-treated, or have a favour to ask, it is a great
+thing to have a good coat on your back in good order.
+
+How many a human being has sleeked the rich softness of my magnificent
+tiger skin, and then said, in perfect good faith, "How Toots enjoys
+being stroked!"
+
+"How you enjoy the feel of my fur, you mean," I am tempted to say. But I
+do not say it. It doesn't do to disturb the self-complacency of people
+who have the control of the milk-jug.
+
+Having made up my mind to coax the gentleman into adopting me, I devoted
+myself entirely to him for the evening, and ignored the rest of the
+party, as serenely as a cat knows how. Again and again did he put me
+down with firm, but not ungentle hands, saying--"Go down, Toots," and
+pick stray hairs in a fidgety manner off his dress-trousers; and again
+and again did I return to his shoulder (where he couldn't see the hairs)
+and purr in his ear, and rub my long whiskers against his short ones.
+
+But it was not till he was comfortably established in an arm-chair by
+the drawing-room fire, round which the rest of the family were also
+seated, that the charm began to work.
+
+"How devoted Toots is to you!" purred the ladies, after an ineffectual
+effort on my part to share the arm-chair.
+
+"You're a very foolish Toots," said the gentleman. (I was back on his
+shoulder by this time.)
+
+"Toots, you've deserted me," said my young mistress. "I'm quite
+jealous," she added.
+
+"Toots, you brute!" cried the gentleman, seizing me in both hands.
+"Where's your good taste, and your gratitude? Go to your mistress, sir,"
+and he threw me into her lap. But I sprang back to his shoulder with one
+leap.
+
+"It's really most extraordinary," said one lady.
+
+"And Toots never goes to strangers as a rule," added my mistress.
+
+Everybody is proud of being _exceptionally_ favoured. It was this last
+stroke, I am convinced, that rubbed him the right way. A gratified
+blandness pervaded his countenance. He made no further attempts to
+dislodge me, and I settled myself into the angles of his shoulder and
+affected to go to sleep.
+
+"What are you going to do with him?" he asked, crossing one long leg
+over the other with a convulsive abruptness very trying to my balance,
+and to the strength of the arm-chair.
+
+Both the ladies began to mew. They were _so_ sorry to leave me behind,
+but it was _quite_ impossible to take me. They couldn't bear to think of
+my being unhappy, and didn't know where in the world to find me a home.
+
+"I wish _you_ would take him!" said my mistress.
+
+I listened breathlessly for the gentleman's reply.
+
+"Pets are not in the least in my line," he said. "I am a bachelor, you
+know, of very tidy habits. I dislike trouble, and have a rooted
+objection to encumbrances."
+
+"We hear you have a pet mouse, though," said my mistress. He laughed
+awkwardly.
+
+"My dear young lady, I never said that my practice always squared with
+my principles. Helpless and troublesome creatures have sometimes an
+insinuating way with them, which forms an additional reason for avoiding
+them, especially if one is weak-minded. And----"
+
+"And you _have_ a pet mouse?"
+
+He sat suddenly upright with another jerk, which nearly shot me into the
+fire-place, and said,
+
+"I'll tell you about it, for upon my word I wish you could see the
+little beggar. It was one afternoon when I came in from riding, that I
+found a mouse sitting on the fender. I could only see his back, with the
+tail twitching, and I noticed that a piece had been bitten out of his
+left ear. The little wretch must have heard me quite well, but he sat on
+as if the place belonged to him.
+
+"'You're pretty cool!' I said; and being rather the reverse myself, I
+threw the Queen's Regulations at him, and he disappeared. But it
+bothered me, for I hate mice in one's quarters. You never know what
+mischief they mayn't be doing. You put valuable papers carefully away,
+and the next time you go to the cupboard, they are reduced to shreds.
+The little brutes take the lining of your slippers to line their nests.
+They keep you awake at night--in short, they're detestable. But I am not
+fond of killing things myself, though I've a sort of a conscience about
+knowing how it's done. I don't like leaving necessary executions to
+servants. As to mice, you know--poisoning is out of the question, on
+sanitary grounds. 'Catch-'em-alive' traps are like a policeman who
+catches a pickpocket--all the trouble of the prosecution is to come; and
+as to the traps with springs and spikes--my man set one in my bedroom
+once, and in the middle of the night the mouse was caught. For nearly an
+hour I doubt if I was much the happier of the two. Every moment I
+thought the poor wretch would stop screaming, for I had ordered the trap
+in the belief that death was instantaneous. At last I jumped up, and put
+the whole concern into my tub and held it under water. The poor beast
+was dead in six seconds. A catch-'em-alive trap and a tub of water is
+the most merciful death, I fancy; but I am rather in favour of letting
+one animal kill another. It seems more natural, and _fairer_. They have
+a run for their lives, so to speak."
+
+"And who did you get to kill your mouse?"
+
+"Well, I know a youngster who has a terrier. They are a perfect pair. As
+like as two peas, and equally keen about sport--they would go twenty
+miles to chase a bluebottle round an attic, sooner than not hunt
+something. So I told him there was a mouse _de trop_ in my rooms, and he
+promised to bring Nipper next morning. I was going out hunting myself.
+
+"The meet was early, and my man got breakfast at seven o'clock for me in
+my own quarters; and the first thing I saw when I came out of my bedroom
+was the mouse sitting on the edge of my Indian silver sugar-basin. I
+knew him again by his ear. And there he sat all breakfast-time,
+twitching his tail, and nibbling little bits of sugar, and watching me
+with such a pair of eyes! Have you ever seen a mouse's eyes close? Upon
+my word, they are wonderfully beautiful, and it's uncommonly difficult
+to hurt a creature with fine eyes. I didn't touch it, and as I was going
+out I looked back, and _the mouse was looking after me_. I was a fool
+for looking back, for I can't stand a pitiful expression in man or
+beast, and it put an end to Nipper's sport, and left me with a mouse in
+my quarters--a thing I hate. I didn't like to say I'd changed my mind
+about killing the mouse, but I wrote to Nipper's master, and said I
+wouldn't trouble him to come up for such a trifling matter."
+
+"So the mouse was safe?"
+
+"Well, _I_ thought so. But the young fellow (who is very good-natured)
+wrote back to say it was no trouble whatever, and the letter lay on my
+mantel-piece till I came home and found that he and Nipper had broken a
+chair-leg, and two china plates."
+
+"_Did_ they kill the mouse?"
+
+"Well, no. But I nearly killed Nipper in saving him; and the little
+rascal has lived with me ever since."
+
+The ladies seemed highly delighted with this anecdote, but, for my own
+part, I felt feverish to the tips of my claws, as I thought of the
+miserable creature who had usurped the place I wished to fill, and who
+might be the means of my having to fall back after all on the Deserted
+Cats' Fund. What bungling puss had had him under her paws, and allowed
+him to escape with a torn ear and the wariness of experience? Let me but
+once catch sight of that twitching tail!----
+
+At this moment the gentleman got up, stretched his long----
+
+But I will _not_ allude to them! It annoys me as much as the thought of
+that bungling cat, or of Nipper's baulked attempt. He put up his hands
+and lifted me from his shoulder, and my heart sank as he said, "If I am
+to catch my train, I fear I must say good-bye."
+
+I believe that, in this hopeless crisis, my fur as usual was in my
+favour. He rubbed his cheek against mine before putting me down, and
+then said, "And you've not told me, after all, where poor Toots is
+really going."
+
+"We have not found a home for him yet, I assure you," said my mistress.
+"Our washerwoman wants him, and she is a most kind-hearted and
+respectable person, but she has got nine children, and----"
+
+"Nine children!" ejaculated my friend, "My poor Toots, there will not be
+an inch of that magnificent tail of yours left at the end of a week.
+What cruelty to animals! Upon my word, I'd almost rather take Toots
+myself, than think of him with a washerwoman and nine children. Eh,
+Toots! would you like to come?"
+
+I was on the carpet, rubbing against his--yes, long or short, they were
+_his_, and he was kind to me!--rubbing, I say, against his legs. I could
+get no impetus for a spring, but I scrambled straight up him as one
+would scramble up a tree (my grandmother was a bird-catcher of the first
+talent, and I inherit her claws), and uttered one pitiful mew.
+
+The gentleman gave a short laugh, and took me into his arms.
+
+"Oh, _how_ good of you! Jones shall get a hamper," cried the ladies. But
+he shook his head.
+
+"Three of the fourteen parcels I've got to pick up at the station are
+hampers. I wouldn't have another on my mind for a fortune. If Toots
+comes at all, he must come like a Christian and look after himself."
+
+I will not dwell on our departure. It was a sadly flurried one, for a
+cat of my temperament. The ladies saw us off, and as my young mistress
+covered me with farewell kisses, I felt an unquestionable pang of
+regret. But one has to repress one's affections, and consider one's
+prospects in life, if one does not want to come upon the Deserted Cats'
+Fund!
+
+My master put his hat on the back of his head on the steps, and knocked
+it off in shouting through a hole in the roof of the cab that we were to
+drive like the wind, as we were late. At the last moment several things
+were thrown in after us. A parcel of books he had lent the young lady,
+and a pair of boots he had left behind on some former occasion. The
+books were very neatly packed, and addressed, but the boots came "like
+Christians, and looked after themselves." And through all, I clung fast,
+and blessed the inherited vigour of my grandmother's claws.
+
+At the parcels office, I certainly risked nine lives among the fourteen
+parcels which were dragged and pitched, and turned over in every
+direction; but though he paid me no other attention, my master never
+forgot to put back a hand to help me when we moved on. Eventually we
+found ourselves alone in a very comfortable carriage, and I suppose the
+fourteen packages were safe too, thanks to the desperate struggles of
+five porters, who went off clutching their paws as if they were
+satisfied with the result.
+
+After incommoding me for some time by rustling newspapers, and making
+spasmodic struggles to find a posture that suited him, my master found
+one at last and fell asleep, and I crept up to the velvet collar of his
+great-coat and followed his example.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+I like living with bachelors. They have comfortable chairs, and keep
+good fires. They don't put water into the tea-pot: they call the
+man-servant and send for more tea. They don't give you a table-spoonful
+of cream, fidgeting and looking round to see if anybody else wants it:
+one of them turns the jug upside-down into your saucer, and before
+another can lay hold of it and say, "Halloa! The milk's all gone,"--you
+have generally had time to lap it up under the table.
+
+I prefer men's outsides, too, to women's in some respects. Why all human
+beings--since they have no coats of their own, and are obliged to buy
+them--do not buy handsomely marked furs whilst they are about it, is a
+puzzle to a cat. As to the miserable stuff ladies cover themselves with
+in an evening, there is about as much comfort and softness in it as in
+going to sleep on a duster. Men's coats are nothing to boast of, either
+to look at or to feel, but they _are_ thicker. If you happen to clutch a
+little with gratification or excitement, your claws don't go through;
+and they don't squeak like a mouse in a trap and call you treacherous
+because their own coats are thin.
+
+I was very comfortable in my new home. My master was exceedingly kind to
+me, and he has a fearless and friendly way of tickling one's toes which
+is particularly agreeable, and not commonly to be met with.
+
+Yes, my life was even more luxurious than before. It is so still. To
+eat, drink, and sleep, to keep oneself warm, and in good condition, and
+to pay proper attention to one's personal appearance; that is all one
+has to do in a life like mine in bachelors' quarters.
+
+One has unpleasant dreams sometimes. I think my tea is occasionally too
+strong, though I have learned to prefer it to milk, and my master
+always gives it to me in his own saucer. If he has friends to tea, they
+give me some in their saucers. One can't refuse, but I fancy too much
+tea is injurious to the nerves.
+
+The night before last, I positively dreamed that I was deserted. I
+fancied that I was chased along a housetop, and fell from the gutter.
+Down--down--but I woke up on the bear-skin before the fire, as our
+man-servant was bringing in candles.
+
+It made me wonder how Mrs. Tabby was getting on. I had never done
+anything further in that matter; but really when one's life goes in a
+certain groove, and everything one can wish for is provided in
+abundance, one never seems to have time for these things. It is
+wonderful how energetic some philanthropic people are. I dare
+say they like the fuss. (I can't endure fuss!) And Mrs. Tabby's
+appearance--excellent creature!--would probably make her feel
+ill-at-ease in bachelor quarters, if we could change places. Her fur is
+really almost mangy, and she has nothing to speak of in the way of a
+tail. But she is a worthy soul. And some day, when the Captain and I are
+going to town without much luggage--or if she should happen to be
+collecting in the country,--I will certainly _look up a few of my worst
+bones for the Fund_.
+
+I really hesitate to approach the subject of my one source of
+discontent. It seems strange that there should be any crook in a lot so
+smooth as ours. Plenty to eat and drink, handsome coats, no
+encumbrances, and a temperament naturally inclined--at least, in my
+case--towards taking life easy. And yet, as I lay stretched full-length
+down one of my master's knees the other night, before a delicious fire,
+and after such a saucerful of creamy tea which he could not drink
+himself--I kept waking up with uncomfortable starts, fancying I saw on
+the edge of the fender--but I will tell the matter in proper order.
+
+I turned round to get my back to it, but I thought of it all the same;
+and as every hair of my moustaches twitched, with the vexation of my
+thoughts, I observed that my master was pulling and biting at his, and
+glaring at the fire as if _he_ expected to see--however, I do not
+trouble myself about the crumples in _his_ rose-leaves. He is big enough
+to take care of himself. My own grievance I will state plainly and at
+once. It may be a relief to my mind, which I sometimes fear will be
+unhinged by dwelling on the thought of--but to begin.
+
+It will easily be understood that after my arrival at my new home, I
+waited anxiously for the appearance of the mouse; but it will hardly be
+credited by any one who knows me, or who knew my grandmother, that I saw
+it and _let it escape me_. It was seated on the sugar-basin, just as the
+Captain had described it. The torn ear, the jerking tail, the bright
+eyes--all were there.
+
+If this story falls into the paws of any young cat who wishes to avoid
+the mortifications which have embittered my favoured existence, let me
+warn him to remember that a creature who has lived on friendly terms
+with human beings cannot be judged by common rules. Many a mouse's eye
+as bright as this one had I seen, but hitherto never one that did not
+paralyze before my own.
+
+He looked at me--I looked at him. His tail jerked--mine responded. Our
+whiskers twitched--joy filled my brain to intoxication--I crept--I
+crouched--I sprang--
+
+He was not spell-bound--he did not even run away. With a cool twinkle of
+that hateful eye, and one twitch of the ragged ear, he just overbalanced
+the silver sugar-pot and dropped to the ground, the basin and sugar
+falling on the top of him with a crash which made me start against my
+will. I think that start just baulked the lightning flash of my second
+leap, and he was gone--absolutely gone. To add insult to injury, my
+master ran in from his bedroom and shouted--"Stealing, Toots? confound
+you, you've knocked down my sugar-pot," and threw both his hair-brushes
+at me.
+
+_I_ steal?--and, worse still, _I_ knock down anything, who have walked
+among three dozen wine-glasses, on a shelf in the butler's pantry,
+without making them jingle! But I must be calm, for there is more to
+tell.
+
+The mouse never returned. It was something, but it was not enough. My
+pride had been deeply hurt, and it demanded revenge. At last I felt it
+almost a grievance that I _did_ reign supreme in the Captain's quarters,
+that the mouse did not come back--and let me catch him.
+
+Besides our in-door man, my master had an Irish groom, and the groom had
+a place (something between a saddle-room and a scullery) where _he_ said
+he "kept what the master required," but where, the master said, Terence
+kept what was not wanted, and lost what was.
+
+There certainly were, to my knowledge, fifteen empty Day and Martin's
+blacking-bottles in one corner, for I used occasionally to walk over
+them to keep my feet in practice, and it was in this room that Terence
+last had conscious possession of the hunting-breeches which were never
+seen after the Captain's birthday, when Terence threw the clothes-brush
+after me, because I would not drink the master's health in whisky, and
+had to take the cleanest of the shoe brushes to his own coat, which was
+dusty from lying in the corn-chest.
+
+But he was a good-natured creature, and now and then, for a change, I
+followed him into the saddle-room. I am thankful to say I have never
+caught mice except for amusement, and a cat of daintier tastes does not
+exist. But one has inherited instincts--and the musty, fusty, mousey
+smell of the room did excite me a little. Besides, I practised my steps
+among the blacking-bottles.
+
+I was on the top of the most tottering part of the pile one afternoon,
+when I saw a pair of bead-like eyes, and--yes, I could swear to it--a
+torn ear. But before I could spring to the ground they had vanished
+behind the corn-chest.
+
+This was how it came about that when the Captain's room was cosiest, and
+he and his friends were kindest, I used to steal away from luxuries
+which are dear to every fibre of my constitution, and pat hastily down
+to the dirty hole, where Terence accumulated old rubbish and misused and
+mislaid valuables--in the wild hope that I might hear, smell, or see the
+ragged-eared enemy of my peace.
+
+What hours I have wasted, now blinking with sleep, now on the alert at
+sounds like the revelries of mocking mice.
+
+When I say that I have even risked wet feet, on a damp afternoon, to get
+there--every cat will understand how wild must have been the
+infatuation!
+
+I tried to reason myself out of it. "Toots," I would say, "you banished
+him from your master's room, and you have probably banished him from
+Terence's. Why pursue the matter farther? So pitiful an object is
+unworthy of your revenge."
+
+"Very true," I would reply to myself, "but I want a turn in the air.
+I'll just step down as far as the saddle-room once more, and make myself
+finally comfortable by looking behind the old barrel. I don't think I
+went quite round it."
+
+There is no delusion so strong when it besets you, or so complete a
+failure in its results--as the hope of getting relief from an
+infatuation by indulging it once more. It grows worse every time.
+
+One day I was stealing away as usual, when I caught my master's eye with
+a peculiar expression in it. He was gnawing his moustaches too. I am
+very fond of him, and I ran back to the chair and looked up and mewed,
+for I wanted to know what was the matter.
+
+"You're a curious cat, Toots," said he; "but I suppose you're only like
+the rest of the world. I did think you did care a little bit for me.
+It's only the cream, is it, old fellow? As a companion, you prefer
+Terence? Eh? Well, off with you!"
+
+But I need hardly say that I would not leave him. It was no want of love
+for him that led me to the saddle-room. I was not base enough to forget
+that he had been my friend in need, even if he had been less amiable to
+me since. All that evening I lay on his breast and slept. _But I dreamt
+of the mouse!_
+
+The next morning he went out riding.
+
+"He will not miss me now," thought I. "I will devote the morning to
+hunting through that wretched room inch by inch, for the last time. It
+will satisfy me that the mouse is not there, and it really is a duty to
+try and convince myself of this, that I may be cured of an infatuation
+which causes annoyance to so excellent a master."
+
+I hurried off as rapidly as befitted the vigour of the resolution, and
+when I got into the saddle-room I saw the mouse. And when the mouse saw
+me he fled like the wind.
+
+I confess that I should have lost him then, but that a hole on which he
+had reckoned was stopped up, and he had to turn.
+
+What a chase it was! Never did I meet his equal for audacity and
+fleetness. But I knew the holes as well as he did, and cut him off at
+every one. Round and round we went--behind the barrel, over the
+corn-chest, and then he made for the middle of the room.
+
+Now, amongst all the rubbish which Terence had collected about him,
+there were many old articles of clothing belonging to the Captain,
+including a pair of long riding-boots, which had been gathering mildew,
+and stiffening out of shape in their present position ever since I came.
+One of these was lying on the floor; and just as I was all but upon the
+mouse, he darted into the boot.
+
+A quiver of delight ran through me. With all his unwonted sagacity,
+Master Mouse had run straight into a trap. The boot was wide, and head
+and shoulders I plunged in after my prey.
+
+I scented him all the way down the leg, but the painful fact is that I
+could not quite get to the bottom. He must have crouched in the toe or
+heel, and I could get no farther than the calf. Oh, if my master's legs
+had but been two inches shorter! I should have clawed into the remotest
+corner of the foot. As it was, I pushed, I struggled, I shook, I worried
+the wretched boot--but all in vain.
+
+Only when I was all but choked did I withdraw my head for a gasp of
+fresh air. And there was the Captain himself, yelling with laughter, and
+sprawling all over the place in convulsions of unseemly merriment, with
+those long legs which--but they are not his fault, poor man!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That is my story--an unfinished tale, of which I do not myself know the
+end. This is the one crook in my luxurious lot--that I cannot see the
+last of that mouse.
+
+Happily, I don't think that my master any longer misunderstands my
+attachment to the saddle-room. The other day, he sat scribbling for a
+long time with a pencil and paper, and when he had done it, he threw the
+sketch to me and said, "There, Toots, look at that, and you will see
+what became of your friend!"
+
+It was civilly meant, and I append the sketch for the sake of those whom
+it may inform. I do not understand pictures myself.
+
+Those boots have a strange fascination for me now. I sit for hours by
+the mouth of the one where he went in and never came back. Not the
+faintest squeak from its recesses has ever stirred the sensitive hairs
+of my watchful ear. He must be starving, but not a nibble of the leather
+have I heard. I doze, but I am ever on the alert. Nightmares
+occasionally disturb me. I fancy I see him, made desperate by hunger,
+creep anxiously to the mouth of the boot, pricking his tagged ear. Once
+I had a terrible vision of his escaping, and of his tail as it vanished
+round the corner.
+
+But these are dreams. He has never returned, I suspect that the truth
+is, that he had a fit from fright, in the toe of the boot, and is dead.
+Some day Terence will shake out his skeleton.
+
+It grows very cold. This place is full of draughts, and the floor is
+damp.
+
+He _must_ be dead. He never could have lasted so long without a move or
+a nibble.
+
+And it is tea-time. I think I shall join the Captain.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+THE HENS OF HENCASTLE.
+
+(_Translated from the German of_ VICTOR BLUeTHGEN.)
+
+
+
+What a hot, drowsy afternoon it was.
+
+The blazing sun shone with such a glare upon the farmyard that it was
+almost unbearable, and there was not a vestige of grass or any green
+thing to relieve the eye or cast a little shade.
+
+But the fowls in the back yard were not disturbed by the heat the least
+bit in the world, for they had plenty of time in which to doze, and they
+were fond of taking a _siesta_ in the hottest place that could be found.
+Certainly the hottest place that afternoon, by far, was the yard in
+which they reposed.
+
+There were five of them--a cock and four hens. Two of the hens were
+renowned throughout the whole village, for they wore tufts of feathers
+on their heads instead of the usual red combs; and the cock was very
+proud of having such distinguished-looking wives.
+
+Besides which, he was naturally a very stately bird himself in
+appearance, and had a splendid blackish-green tail and a golden speckled
+hackle, which shone and glistened in the sun. He had also won many sharp
+battles with certain young cocks in the neighbourhood, whom curiosity
+about the tufted foreigners had attracted to the yard. The consequence
+of these triumphs was that he held undisputed dominion as far as the
+second fence from the farmyard, and whenever he shut his eyes and
+sounded his war-clarion, the whole of his rivals made off as fast as
+wings and legs could carry them.
+
+So the five sat or stood by themselves in the yard, dozing in the
+sunshine, and they felt bored.
+
+During the middle of the day they had managed to get some winks of
+sleep, but now the farmer's men began to thresh in a barn close by,
+making noise enough to wake the dead, so there was small chance of
+well-organized fowls being able to sleep through the din.
+
+"I wish some one would tell a story," said one of the common hens, as
+she ruffled all her feathers up on end, and then shook them straight
+again, for coolness. "I am tired of scrabbling in the dust, and
+fly-catching is an amusement only suited to sparrows and such vulgar
+birds."
+
+This was a hit at one of the foreign hens, who had wandered away a
+little and was pecking at flies on the wall. The two common hens were
+very fond of vexing the foreign ones, for their feelings were hurt at
+being reckoned less beautiful and rare.
+
+The tufted fair one heard the remark, and called out spitefully from a
+distance: "If certain people were not ignorant country bumpkins, they
+would be able to tell a good story themselves."
+
+"That remark can't apply to me, for I know a great number of stories,"
+replied the common hen, turning her head on one side to show her
+contempt. "For instance: once upon a time there was a hen who laid
+nothing but soft-shelled eggs--"
+
+"You can't mean _me_ by that story," said the tufted one, "for I have
+only laid one soft-shelled egg in my whole life. So there! But do tell
+me how your interesting story ends--I am so anxious to hear the end."
+
+"You know that best yourself," retorted the other.
+
+"Now I'm sure, dear Father Cock, you could tell us something really
+amusing if you would be so kind," said the second common hen, who was
+standing near him. "Those two make one's life a burthen, with their
+everlasting wrangling and bickering."
+
+"Hush!" said the cock, who was standing motionless with one leg in the
+air, an attitude he often assumed when any very hard thinking had to be
+done; "I was just trying to recollect one."
+
+After a pause, he said in a solemn voice: "I will tell you the terrible
+tale of the troubles of 'The Hens of Hencastle.'
+
+"Once upon a time--it was the village fair week, when, as you know,
+every one eats and drinks as much as he possibly can, and consequently a
+great many animals are killed,--the farmer's cook came into the
+fowlyard, and after carefully looking over all the chickens, remarked
+that seven of them would be twisting merrily on the spit next morning.
+On hearing this, all the fowls were plunged into the deepest despair,
+for no one felt sure that he would not be of the seven, and no one could
+guess how the victims would be chosen. Two young cockerels, in their
+deep perplexity, at last went to the yard-dog, Flaps by name, who was a
+very great friend of theirs, and to him they cackled out their woes.
+
+"'Why do you stop here?' asked Flaps. 'If you had any pluck at all you
+would run away.'
+
+"'Ah! Perhaps so--but who has enough courage for such a desperate step?'
+sighed the young cockerels. 'Why, you yourself are no more courageous
+than we, else why do you stop here chained up all day, and allow those
+tiresome children to come and tease you?'
+
+"'Well,' replied the dog, 'I earn a good livelihood by putting up with
+these small discomforts, and besides that, _I_ am not going to be set
+twisting on a spit. However, if you particularly wish it, we can go
+away somewhere together; but if we do, I may as well tell you at once,
+that you will have to feed me.'
+
+"The cockerels, fired by this bold advice, betook themselves at once to
+the henroost with the courage of young lions; and after a short but
+animated discussion, persuaded the whole of the cocks and hens to run
+away and to take Flaps as protector of the community.
+
+"When darkness fell, the dog was unchained for the night as usual, and
+as soon as the coast seemed clear, he went to the henhouse, pushed back
+the sliding door with his nose, and let them all out.
+
+"Then he and the whole company stole away as quietly as possible through
+the yard-gate, away out into the open country.
+
+"The fowls flew and wandered on, the livelong night, perfectly happy in
+their freedom, and feeding themselves from the sheaves of corn that
+stood in the stubble-fields.
+
+"Whenever Flaps felt hungry, the hens laid him a couple of eggs or so
+which he found far nicer than barley-meal and dog-biscuit.
+
+"When they passed through thinly-populated places where they were not
+likely to be observed, they marched gaily forward; but whenever there
+was a chance of danger, they only travelled by night.
+
+"Meanwhile the cook went early in the morning to kill the chickens; but
+on finding the whole place as empty as Mother Hubbard's cupboard, she
+fell into a violent fit of hysterics, and the kitchen-maid and pig-boy
+had to put her under the pump, and work it hard for a quarter of an hour
+before they could revive her.
+
+"After some days' journeying, the wanderers arrived at a large
+desolate-looking heath, in the middle of which stood an old
+weather-beaten house, apparently uninhabited. Flaps was sent forward to
+examine it, and he searched from garret to cellar without finding a
+trace of a human being. The fowls then examined the neighbourhood for
+two whole days and nights with a like result, and so they determined to
+take up their abode in the dwelling.
+
+"In they trooped, and set themselves to work to turn it into a strong
+castle, well fortified against all danger. They stopped up the holes and
+cracks with tufts of grass, and piled a wall of big and little stones
+right round the house. When the repairs were completed they called it
+Hencastle.
+
+"During the autumn some of the fowls ventured forth into the cornfields
+that lay near the haunts of men, and collected a store of grain to
+supply them with food during the winter. They kept it on the floor of a
+loft, and when spring came they sowed the remainder of the stock in a
+field, where it produced such an abundant crop that they had plenty of
+provisions for the following winter.
+
+"Thus they lived a peaceful and happy life, which was so uneventful that
+it has no history; and Mark, the watchman, who always stood on the
+coping-stone of the highest chimney to act as sentinel, used constantly
+to fall asleep, partly from sheer boredom, and partly from the combined
+effects of old age, good living, and having nothing on earth to do.
+Flaps, too, who had undertaken to guard the castle against intruders,
+and who at first used to patrol the house carefully inside and out every
+night, soon came to the conclusion that the game was not worth the
+candle.
+
+"One chilly evening, about the time of the first snows, when the wind
+was beginning to whistle over the heath and make strange noises in the
+castle, two old hens were up in the loft having a chat and picking up a
+few stray grains of corn for supper. All of a sudden they heard a
+mysterious 'Piep.' 'Hollo!' said one, 'what's that? no one can be
+hatching out at this time of the year--it's impossible; yet surely
+something said "Piep" down there in the corner.'
+
+"Just then another 'Piep' was heard.
+
+"'I don't think it sounds _quite_ like a young chicken,' replied the
+other hen.
+
+"In the middle of their discussion on this knotty point, they descried
+a couple of mice at the edge of the corn-heap. One of them was sitting
+on his hind-legs, washing his ears and whiskers with his fore-paws, but
+his wife was gobbling up corn at a rapid rate, and in this sight the
+wise and far-seeing old hens discerned the probability of future
+troubles.
+
+"'Hollo there! that's our corn,' they cried; 'you mustn't steal it. Of
+course you may have a few grains in the depth of winter to keep you from
+starving; but remember, when spring comes again, this sort of thing must
+stop, and you must go away and never come here any more.'
+
+"'Piep,' said the mice, and vanished.
+
+"The two hens told the rest what had happened, but nobody troubled
+themselves about such an insignificant matter, and some said that the
+poor old things made mountains out of molehills. Anyhow, in two days
+everybody, including the wise hens themselves, had forgotten all about
+it. Later on, that winter, the mice had seven young ones--seven such
+skinny, thread-limbed, beady-eyed little beasts that no one noticed
+their arrival.
+
+"Very soon after, almost before any hen had time to look round or think,
+behold! mice were squeaking in every corner, and there were holes behind
+every wainscot, plank, and rafter.
+
+"A year passed away, and when winter returned again the mice came and
+took the stored corn away in such quantities that everybody saw none
+would be left to sow in the spring.
+
+"Matters had come to a crisis; many and anxious discussions were held
+amongst the fowls, for good counsel was a thing much sought after at
+Hencastle.
+
+"At first they took very energetic measures, and many a mouse fell a
+victim to a well-aimed peck from a cock's beak; but alas! the mice took
+energetic measures also, and resisted to the death, so that many a
+fowl's leg was bitten to the bone. Much had been said, and much was
+done, but the mice were more numerous than before.
+
+"The commonwealth then decided on sending three experienced cocks out
+into the world, to try and find some means for getting rid of the plague
+of mice.
+
+"The cocks journeyed for one whole day without finding anything to help
+them in their trouble, but towards evening they came to a wild, rocky
+mountainside, full of caves and clefts, and made up their minds to stay
+there for the night; so they crept into a hole under a ledge of rock,
+put their heads under their wings, and went to sleep.
+
+"In the middle of the night they were roused by the sound of flapping
+wings, followed by a whispering voice, saying, 'whish--ish,' which soon
+broke out into a loud 'Whoo--hoo! whoo--hoo!' They popped their heads
+out of the hole to see what was the matter, and they perceived a great
+owl sitting on a stump, flapping its wings up and down, and rolling its
+great round eyes about, which glared like red-hot coals in its head.
+
+"'Mice here! Mice here! Whoo--hoo!' it shrieked.
+
+"On hearing this the cocks nudged one another, and said, 'We are in
+luck's way at last.' Then as the owl still continued to call for mice,
+one of them plucked up courage and addressed it: 'If you will only come
+with us, sir, you shall have as many mice as you can eat--a whole
+house-full, if you like.'
+
+"'Who may you be?' hissed the owl, and glared with its fiery eyes into
+the cleft.
+
+"'We come from Hencastle, where there are hundreds of mice, who devour
+our corn day and night.
+
+"'Whoo--hoo! I'll come, I'll come,' screamed the owl, snapping its beak
+with pleasure.
+
+"In the grey of the dawn the fowls sat on the roof-tree, listening to
+Mark, the watchman, who stood on the top of, his chimney, and cried,
+
+    "'What do I see?
+    Here come the three!
+    And with them, I reckon,
+    A bird with no neck on.'
+
+"Thereupon the owl and the three messengers flew up with a rush to the
+top of the castle.
+
+"'Ha! ha! I smell mice,' shrieked the new comer, and dashed through a
+hole in the roof, from whence it shortly reappeared with a mouse in its
+claws.
+
+"This sight filled all the fowls with joy; and as they sat on the edge
+of the roof in a row, they nudged each other, and remarked,
+
+"'This has indeed been a happy venture.'
+
+"For a few days everything went as smoothly as possible, but after a
+time the mice began to find out that the owl could only see really well
+at night, that it saw badly by day, and hardly at all when the midday
+sun was shining through the window into the loft. So they only came out
+at noon, and then dragged enough corn away into their holes to last them
+till the following day.
+
+"One night the owl did not catch a single mouse, and so, being very
+hungry, drove its beak into some hen's eggs that lay in a corner, and
+ate them. Finding them more to its taste than the fattest mouse, and
+much less trouble to catch, henceforth the owl gave up mouse-hunting,
+and took to egg-poaching. This the fowls presently discovered, and the
+three wise cocks were sent to tell the owl to go away, as it was no
+longer of use to anybody, for it never caught mice but only ate eggs.
+
+"'Whoo--hoo! whoo--hoo! More eggs--give me more eggs, or I'll scratch
+your eyes out,' shrieked the owl, and began to whet its beak on a beam
+in such a savage manner that the three cocks fled in terror to the top
+of the chimney.
+
+"Having somewhat recovered from their alarm, they went down and told
+Flaps, who was basking in the sunshine, that the owl must be got rid of.
+
+"'What, are all the mice eaten, then?' inquired he.
+
+"'Alas!' answered one of the cocks, 'the brute will eat nothing but eggs
+now, and threatens to scratch our eyes out if we don't supply as many
+more as it wants.'
+
+"'Wait till noonday,' said the dog, 'and I'll soon bring the rascal to
+reason.'
+
+"At twelve o'clock Flaps quietly pushed the door open and went up into
+the loft. There sat the old owl winking and blinking in a corner.
+
+"'So you are the robber who is going to scratch people's eyes out,' said
+Flaps. 'For this you must die!'
+
+"'That remains to be seen,' sneered the owl; 'but eyes I will have, and
+dogs' eyes too!' and with that it swooped down upon Flaps' head; but the
+old dog seized the bird between his teeth and killed it, though not
+before one of his own eyes had been scratched out in the struggle.
+
+"'No matter,' said Flaps; 'I've done my duty, at any rate, and I don't
+know why I should want more than one eye to see with;' and so saying, he
+went back to his post.
+
+"The fowls made a great feast, which lasted the whole day, to celebrate
+the owl's death.
+
+"But the mice remained in the castle, and continued to increase and
+multiply. So the three wise cocks had to go forth on a second voyage of
+discovery, in order to try and find a remedy against the intruders.
+
+"They flew on for a night and a day without any result; but towards
+morning, on the second day, they alighted to rest in a thick wood, and
+there, in one of the forest glades, just as the sun was rising, they saw
+a red-coated animal watching a mouse-hole. It was a fox, who had come
+out to find something for breakfast. They soon saw him catch a mouse and
+eat it, and then heard him say, 'Heaven be praised for small mercies! I
+have managed to secure a light breakfast at last, though I've been
+hunting all night in vain.'
+
+"'Do you hear that?' said one of the messengers. 'He considers himself
+very lucky to have caught a single mouse. That's the sort of animal we
+want.'
+
+"So the cock called down from the tree--'I say! below there! Mr.
+Mouse-eater! you can have a whole loft-full of such long-tailed vermin
+as that, if you will come with us. But you must first solemnly swear
+that you will never eat eggs instead of mice.'
+
+"'Nothing on earth shall ever tempt me to touch an egg. I swear it most
+solemnly,' said the fox, staring up into the tree. 'But whence do you
+come, my worthy masters?'
+
+"'We live at Hencastle, but no one knows where that is except the mice,
+who eat us out of house and home.'
+
+"'You don't say so,' said the fox from below, licking his lips. 'And are
+there many more such handsome, magnificent birds as you are, at
+Hencastle?'
+
+"'Why, of course, the whole place is full of them.'
+
+"'Then I'll come with you,' said the fox, lowering his eyes, lest the
+cocks should discern the hungry look in them. 'And if there are a
+thousand mice in the loft, they shall all soon lick the dust. Ah! you
+don't know what delicious dainties such--mice--are.'
+
+"This time the fowls had to wait till evening before they heard Mark,
+the watchman, crowing from his chimney, and calling forth,
+
+    "'Here come the three!
+    But what do I see?
+    Why, the friend that they bring
+    Is a four-legged thing.'
+
+"When the fox got to the outer wall, he sniffed about uneasily and
+said,
+
+"'I smell a dog, and I am not fond of the race, nor do they as a rule
+like me.'
+
+"'You need not be alarmed,' replied the cocks; 'there is only one of
+them here--our friend Mr. Flaps,--and he is always stationed outside the
+castle; besides, he is just as glad as we are that you have come to kill
+the mice.'
+
+"But in spite of this assurance, the fox did not at all like the idea of
+going in past Flaps, who stood at the door, showing his teeth, and with
+the hair down his back standing on end; but at last, catching sight of a
+number of plump young chickens looking out at a window, Reynard could
+resist no longer, and with his mouth watering in anxiety to be among
+them, he slipped past Flaps like lightning, and scampered up into the
+loft. Once there, he behaved so affably to the fowls, and especially to
+some of the oldest and most influential hens, that very soon every one
+looked on him as their friend in time of need, and their enthusiasm was
+brought to a climax when they saw him catch four mice in half as many
+minutes.
+
+"In the dead of the night, when all were asleep, Reynard crept up to
+where the fowls roosted, and finding out where the youngest and fattest
+were perched, he snapped off the heads of a couple before they had even
+time to flutter a feather. He then carried them to the window, opened it
+very gently, dropped the dead bodies out on to the ground beneath, and
+then sped away down to the house-door and bolted it.
+
+"When he had done this, he returned to the old hens and woke them by
+groaning in such a heartbreaking manner, that all the fowls crowded
+round him to know what was amiss.
+
+"'Alas!' cried he, 'it has been my sad lot to witness a most fearful
+sight. That dog whom you keep down below to guard the house slipped in
+at the door, and going to the corner where the lovely young chickens
+roost, quicker than thought killed two that were more beautiful than
+angels. I was chasing a mouse under the stairs at the time, and happened
+to come up just as the dreadful deed was done, and I saw the robber
+making off with his booty. Only come with me a minute, and you shall see
+that I have spoken the truth.'
+
+"He took the scared and frightened fowls to the window, and when they
+looked out, they saw to their horror their guardian Flaps sniffing at
+the dead bodies on the ground outside.
+
+"'Who would have thought it!' said the hens, in an awe-stricken whisper.
+
+"'You may thank me,' said the fox, 'for my presence of mind in bolting
+the house-door when he ran out, or no one knows how many more he would
+have killed! If you will take my advice, you will send him about his
+business; and if you will put me in his place, I can assure you that you
+shall be protected in quite another manner.'
+
+"'Hi! open the door,' cried Flaps, who saw something was wrong; 'you've
+got another King Stork, I'll be bound.' But though he rattled and shook
+the door, no one unbolted it. 'Ah!' sighed Flaps, 'before long the whole
+pack of idiots will be killed and eaten.' So he scratched open an old
+hole in the wall that had been stopped up, and crept in. He arrived just
+in time to hear the old hens giving orders that no more eggs were to be
+given him, and that the door was to be kept bolted, in order that he
+might be obliged either to leave the place or to starve.
+
+"They were all talking at once, and so eagerly, that no one noticed the
+dog come up behind them. He gave one spring and seized the fox by the
+throat. The attack was quite unexpected, but the fox fought, writhed,
+and wriggled like an eel, and just as he was being borne down, he made
+one desperate snap, and bit off the dog's ear close to the head.
+
+"'Well, my ear is done for, but so is this blood-thirsty villain,' said
+Flaps, looking down at the fox, which lay dead at his feet; 'and as for
+you, you pack of ungrateful fools, one ear is quite enough to listen to
+you with. Here have I been your faithful comrade for all these years,
+and yet you believe that I have turned murderer in my old age on the
+word of this rogue, who did the evil deed himself last night.'
+
+"Now that the panic was over, the fowls felt heartily ashamed of
+themselves for having been deceived by the fox, and done Flaps such
+great injustice. So they all asked his pardon, and the feast which they
+held to celebrate their deliverance from the fox was even more
+magnificent than the last, and it went on for two whole days.
+
+"Hencastle was _en fete_ for a time, but it was a very short time. For
+the mice were no less glad than the fowls that their enemy was dead; and
+now that both he and the owl had disappeared, they came out fearlessly
+at all hours of the day, and lived a life quite free from trouble and
+care.
+
+"Not so the fowls. What was to be done with the ever-increasing colony
+of corn-stealers? The more the fowls meditated, the more the mice
+squeaked and played about, and the more corn they dragged away into
+their holes. There was even a rumour that some one meddled with the
+eggs.
+
+"There was nothing for it but to dispatch the three messengers a third
+time, with directions to be more vigilant and careful than before. Away
+they flew, farther than ever. The first chance of help that arose was
+from a couple of cats and a kite, who seemed likely to perform the
+required work, but the cocks declined to accept their aid, feeling that
+the Hencastle had suffered too much already from two-winged and
+four-legged protectors.
+
+"At length the messengers reached a bit of waste ground close to a
+village, and there they saw an extremely grimy-looking gipsy sitting on
+a bank. He knocked the ashes out of his black pipe, and muttered, 'I've
+the luck of a dog! Here am I with a lot of the best mouse-traps in the
+world, and I haven't sold one this blessed day!'
+
+"'Here's luck!' said the wise birds. 'That is exactly the man for us; he
+is neither two-winged nor four-legged, so he will be quite safe.'
+
+"They flew down at once to the rat-catcher and made their proposition.
+He laughed softly and pleasantly to himself, and accepted their
+invitation without any demur, and started at once with a light step and
+lighter heart for Hencastle.
+
+"Two days after this, the fowls heard Mark, the watchman, crowing away
+lustily from his chimney-pot,
+
+    "'What do I see?
+    Here come the three!
+    And the black beast they bring
+    Has no tail and no wing.'
+
+"'But,' added the sentinel in less official language, 'he carries a
+bundle of things that look like little houses made of wire.'
+
+"The gipsy was at once taken up to the loft, and having, luckily, a few
+scraps of strong-smelling bacon left over from his last night's supper,
+he struck a light and managed to make a small fire in the long-disused
+grate with some bits of dry grass and chips. He then frizzled some bacon
+and baited his traps, and in less than ten minutes he had filled them
+all, for the mice had never smelt such a delicious thing as fried bacon
+before, and besides, they were new to the wiles of man.
+
+"The fowls were wild with delight, and in their thankfulness they
+bethought them of a special mark of favour, and every hen came clucking
+up to him and laid an egg at his feet.
+
+"For about a week the gipsy did nothing but catch mice and eat eggs; but
+all things must have an end, and the bacon ran out, just when the gipsy
+had come to the conclusion that he was heartily sick of egg-diet. Being
+a man of action, he put out his hand suddenly and caught the fattest and
+nicest young chicken within reach, and promptly wrung its neck.
+
+"Oh, what a row there was in the henroost! The cocks began to crow loud
+enough to split their throats, and the hens to fly about and cackle. The
+man was nearly deafened, and yelled out at the top of his voice, 'What
+do you expect, you fools? Mice can only be caught with meat, and meat I
+must and will have too.' He then let them rave on, and quietly and
+methodically continued to pluck his chicken. When it was ready, he made
+a fire and began to roast it.
+
+"In the meanwhile, Flaps had heard all the noise and outcry, and as it
+showed no signs of abating, he thought the man was most likely in
+mischief, so he went into the castle.
+
+"'Oh! Woe! Misery! Horror! Despair!' cried all the fowls at once as soon
+as they saw him. 'The murderer has slain young Scratchfoot the cock, and
+is just going to roast him!'
+
+"'You're a dead man,' growled Flaps to the rat-catcher, as soon as he
+got up to the loft.
+
+"'I'm not so sure of that, my fine cur,' said the man, taking hold of
+the cudgel he had brought with him, and tucking up his sleeves.
+
+"But the brave old dog sprang at him and bit him so severely that he
+uttered a savage groan, and dealt Flaps a heavy blow with his cudgel.
+This nearly broke the dog's leg and obliged him to relax his hold, on
+which the gipsy dashed down-stairs and ran away with such speed that
+Flaps on three legs had no chance of overtaking him.
+
+"'Wait a bit!' cried the man from afar. 'I'll remember you!' And then
+his retreating figure became smaller and smaller on the heath until at
+last it disappeared altogether.
+
+"This time the fowls had no heart for a feast. They sat brooding and
+moping in rows on the rafters, for they began to see very clearly that
+it was quite hopeless to try and get rid of the mice.
+
+"Poor old Flaps, too, was very ill. A good many days elapsed before he
+could get about, and for years he walked lame on his injured leg.
+
+"One morning as the fowls were listlessly wandering about, wondering
+what was to happen next, Mark, the watchman, was heard crowing away in a
+very excited manner,
+
+    "'What do I see?
+    Twenty and three!'
+
+"'What do you see?' cried they all in a great fright. 'Twenty and three
+what?'
+
+"'An army of soldiers dressed in smock frocks. They are armed with
+pitchforks, and the black gipsy is their general.'
+
+"The fowls flew up like a cloud to the roof, and sure enough they saw
+the rat-catcher coming across the heath with a crowd of villagers
+towards the castle.
+
+"When they broke the doleful news to Flaps, he said, 'That scoundrel of
+a man has betrayed our hiding-place, and we must wander forth again. Get
+ready, and keep up your spirits, and remember that in any case we should
+not have been able to stay here much longer, on account of the mice.'
+
+"So the hens filled their crops as full as possible, and escaped with
+Flaps out at the back door.
+
+"When the country-folk got to the house, they found nothing in it but a
+small heap of corn; so they fell upon the gipsy and half killed him for
+having brought them on a fool's errand. Then they divided what little
+corn there was left, and went away.
+
+"As to the mice they were left to whistle for their food.
+
+"So ends the tale of the Hens of Hencastle."
+
+"And a very fine tale too," said one of the stranger-hens who had been
+asleep all the time, and woke up with a jump. "It was deeply
+interesting." The threshers happened to have stopped to rest for a
+moment, or she would never have woke at all.
+
+"Of course it was!" said the cock, full of dignity; and he shook his
+feathers straight.
+
+"But what became of the fowls afterwards?" asked one of the common hens.
+
+"I never tell a hen a secret," said the cock; and he strutted off to
+hunt for worms.
+
+
+
+
+FLAPS.
+
+A SEQUEL TO "THE HENS OF HENCASTLE."
+
+
+
+And what became of Flaps after they all left Hencastle? Well, he led his
+company on and on, but they could find no suitable place to settle in;
+and when the fowls recovered from their fright, they began to think that
+they had abandoned the castle too hastily, and to lay the blame on
+Flaps.
+
+Mark himself said that he might have overestimated the number of the
+invaders. There might not have been twenty-three, but really Flaps was
+in such a hurry for the news, and one must say something when it was
+one's duty to make a report.
+
+The three wise cocks objected to speak of themselves or their services,
+but they had had some experience on behalf of the community in times of
+danger, and in their opinion there had been a panic, and the hasty
+action taken by Flaps was injudicious and regrettable.
+
+The oldest hen of Hencastle shook her feathers to show how much Flaps
+was in the wrong, and then puffed them out to show how much she was in
+the right; and after clearing her throat almost as if she were going to
+crow, she observed very shrilly that she "didn't care who contradicted
+her when she said that the common sense of the Mother of a Family was
+enough to tell _her_ that an old dog, who had lost an eye and an ear and
+a leg, was no fit protector for the feminine and the young and the
+inexperienced."
+
+The chief cock was not so free of his opinions as the chief hen, but he
+grumbled and scolded about everything, by which one may make matters
+amply unpleasant without committing oneself or incurring responsibility.
+
+Another of the hens made a point of having no opinion. She said that was
+her way, she trusted everybody alike and bore her share of suffering,
+which was seldom small, without a murmur. But her good wishes were
+always at any one's service, and she would say that she sincerely hoped
+that a sad injustice had not been done to the red-haired gentleman with
+the singularly agreeable manners, who would have been gatekeeper of
+Hencastle at this moment if it had not been for Flaps.
+
+Poor Flaps! Well might he say, "One ear is enough to listen to you with,
+you pack of ungrateful fools!"
+
+He was beginning to find out that, as a rule, the Helpless have a nice
+way with them of flinging all their cares upon the Helpful, and
+reserving their own energies to pick holes in what is done on their
+behalf; and that they are apt to flourish, in good health and poor
+spirits, long after such friends as Flaps have been worn out, bit by
+bit, in their service.
+
+"First an eye, then an ear, then a leg," the old dog growled to himself;
+"and there's not a fowl with a feather out of him. But I've done my
+duty, and that's enough."
+
+Matters went from bad to worse. The hens had no corn, and Flaps got no
+eggs, and the prospect of either home or food seemed very remote. One
+evening it was very rainy, the fowls roosted in a walnut-tree for
+shelter, and Flaps fell asleep at the foot of it.
+
+"Could anything be more aggravating than that creature's indifference?"
+said Hen No. 2. "Here we sit, wet to the skin, and there he lies asleep!
+Dear me! I remember one of my neck feathers got awry once, at dear old
+Hencastle (the pencilling has been a good deal admired in my time,
+though I say it that shouldn't), and the Red-haired Gentleman noticed it
+in a moment. I remember he put his face as close to mine as I am to you,
+but in the most gentlemanly manner, and murmured so softly,
+
+"'Excuse me--there's just one of those lovely little feathers the least
+bit in the world--'
+
+"I believe it was actually between his lips, when we were interrupted,
+and I had to put it tidy myself. But we might all be plucked as bare as
+poor young Scratchfoot before Flaps would think of smoothing us down.
+Just hear how he snores! Ah! it's a trying world, but I never complain."
+
+"I do, though," said the chief hen. "I'm not one to put up with neglect.
+Hi, there! are you asleep?" And scratching a bit of the rough bark off
+the walnut-tree, she let it drop on to Flaps' nose.
+
+"I'm awake," said Flaps; "what's the matter?"
+
+"I never knew any one snore when he was awake before," said the hen; and
+all the young cockerels chuckled.
+
+"Well, I believe I was napping," said Flaps. "Damp weather always makes
+me sleepy, and I was dreaming of the old farmyard."
+
+"Poor old farm!" sighed Hen No. 2. "We had board and lodging there, at
+any rate."
+
+"And now we've neither," said Hen No. 1. "Mr. Flaps, do you know that
+we're wet to the skin, and dying of starvation, whilst you put your nose
+into your great-coat pocket and go to sleep?"
+
+"You're right," said Flaps. "Something must be done this evening. But I
+see no use in taking the whole community about in the rain. We will send
+out another expedition."
+
+"Cock-a-doodle-doo!" screamed the three wise ones; "that means that
+we're to face the storm whilst you have another nap, eh?"
+
+"It seems an odd thing," said the chief cock, scratching his comb with
+his claw, "that Flaps never thinks of going himself on these
+expeditions."
+
+"You're right," said Flaps. "It is an odd thing, for times out of mind
+I've heard our old friend, the farmer, say, 'If you want a thing
+done--Go; if not--Send.' This time I shall go. Cuddle close to each
+other, and keep up your spirits. I'll find us a good home yet."
+
+The fowls were much affected by Flaps' magnanimity, and with one voice
+they cried: "Thank you, dear Flaps. Whatever you decide upon will do for
+us."
+
+And Mark added, "I will continue to act as watchman." And he went up to
+the top of the tree as Flaps trotted off down the muddy road.
+
+All that evening and far into the night it rained and rained, and the
+fowls cuddled close to each other to keep warm, and Flaps did not
+return. In the small hours of the morning the rain ceased, and the
+rain-clouds drifted away, and the night-sky faded and faded till it was
+dawn.
+
+"Cock-a-doodle-doo!" said Mark, and all the fowls woke up.
+
+"What do you see and hear from the tree-top, dear Mark?" said they. "Is
+Flaps coming?"
+
+    "Not a thing can I see
+    From the top of the tree,
+    But a long, winding lane
+    That is sloppy with rain;"
+
+replied Mark. And the fowls huddled together again, and put their heads
+back under their wings.
+
+Paler and paler grew the grey sky, and at last it was broken with golden
+bars, and at the first red streak that caught fire behind them, Mark
+crowed louder than before, and all the hens of Hencastle roused up for
+good.
+
+"What do you see and hear from the tree-top, dear Mark?" they inquired.
+"Is Flaps coming?"
+
+    "Not a sound do I hear,
+    And I very much fear
+    That Flaps, out of spite,
+    Has deserted us quite;"
+
+replied Mark. And the fowls said nothing, for they were by no means at
+ease in their consciences.
+
+Their delight was proportionably great when, a few minutes later, the
+sentinel sang out from his post,
+
+    "Here comes Flaps, like the mail!
+    And he's waving his tail."
+
+"Well, dear, dear Flaps!" they all cackled as he came trotting up,
+"where is our new home, and what is it like?"
+
+"Will there be plenty to eat?" asked the cocks with one crow.
+
+"Plenty," replied Flaps.
+
+"Shall we be safe from mice, owls, wild beasts, and wild men?" cried the
+hens.
+
+"You will," answered Flaps.
+
+"Is it far, dear Flaps?"
+
+"It is very near," said Flaps; "but I may as well tell you the truth at
+once--it's a farmyard."
+
+"Oh!--" said all the fowls.
+
+"We may be roasted, or have our heads chopped off," whimpered the young
+cockerels.
+
+"Well, Scratchfoot was roasted at Hencastle," said Flaps; "and he wasn't
+our only loss. One can't have everything in this world; and I assure
+you, if you could see the poultry-yard--so dry under foot, nicely wired
+in from marauders; the most charming nests, with fresh hay in them;
+drinking-troughs; and then at regular intervals, such abundance of corn,
+mashed potatoes, and bones, that my own mouth watered at--are served
+out--"
+
+"That sounds good," said the young cockerels.
+
+"Ahem! ahem!" said the chief cock. "Did you see anything very
+remarkable--were the specimens of my race much superior in strength and
+good looks?----"
+
+"My dear cock!" said Flaps; "there's not a tail or a comb or a hackle to
+touch you. You'll be cock of the walk in no time."
+
+"Ahem! ahem!" said the chief cock modestly. "I have always had a sort of
+fatality that way. Pray, my dears, don't look so foolish and deplorable,
+but get the young people together, and let us make a start. Mr. Flaps is
+a person of strong common sense, a quality for which I myself have
+always been remarkable, and I thoroughly endorse and support his
+excellent advice, of which I am the best judge. I have very much
+regretted of late to observe a tendency in this family (I say a
+tendency, for I hope it goes no further) to undervalue Mr. Flaps, and
+even (I hardly like to allude to such reprehensible and disgusting
+absurdity) to recall the memory of a vulgar red-haired impostor, who
+gained a brief entrance into our family circle. I am not consulted as I
+should be in these fluctuations of opinion, but there are occasions when
+it is necessary that the head of a family should exercise his discretion
+and his authority, and, so to speak, put down his claw. I put down my
+claw. We are going to Mr. Flaps' farmyard. Cock-a-doodle-doo
+Cock-a-doodle-doo!"
+
+Now, when the head of a family says "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" there is
+nothing more to be said. So to the farmyard the whole lot of them went,
+and were there before the sun got one golden hair of his head over the
+roof of the big barn.
+
+And only Mark, as they all crowded into their new home, turned his head
+round over his back to say: "And you, Flaps; what shall you do?"
+
+"Oh, I shall be all right," said Flaps. "Good-bye and good luck to you."
+
+It cannot be said that Flaps was positively in high spirits when he had
+settled his proteges in their new home in the farmyard, and was left
+alone; but there are some good folk who contrive to make duty do the
+work of pleasure in this life, and then a piece of business fairly
+finished is as good as a treat.
+
+It is not bread and bones, however, and Flaps was very hungry--so hungry
+that he could not resist the temptation to make his way towards the
+farmhouse, on the chance of picking up some scraps outside. And that was
+how it came about, that when the farmer's little daughter Daisy, with a
+face like the rosy side of a white-heart cherry set deep in a lilac
+print hood, came back from going with the dairy lass to fetch up the
+cows, she found Flaps snuffing at the back door, and she put her arms
+round his neck (they reached right round with a little squeezing) and
+said:
+
+"Oh, I never knew you'd be here so early! You nice thing!"
+
+And Flaps' nose went right into the print hood, and he put out his
+tongue and licked Daisy's face from the point of her chin up her right
+cheek to her forehead, and then from her forehead down her left cheek
+back to her chin, and he found that she was a very nice thing too.
+
+But the dairymaid screamed, "Good gracious! where did that nasty strange
+dog come from? Leave him alone, Miss Daisy, or he'll bite your nose
+off."
+
+"He won't!" said Daisy indignantly. "He's the dog Daddy promised me;"
+and the farmer coming out at that minute, she ran up to him crying,
+"Daddy! Isn't this my dog?"
+
+"Bless the child, no!" said the farmer; "it's a nice little pup I'm
+going to give thee. Where did that dirty old brute come from?"
+
+"He would wash," said little Daisy, holding very fast to Flaps' coat.
+
+"Fine washing too!" said the dairymaid, "And his hair's all lugs."
+
+"I could comb them," said Daisy.
+
+"He's no but got one eye," said the swineherd. "Haw! haw! haw!"
+
+"He sees me with the other," said Daisy. "He's looking up at me now."
+
+"And one of his ears gone!" cried the dairy lass. "He! he! he!"
+
+"Perhaps I could make him a cap," said Daisy, "as I did when my doll
+lost her wig. It had pink ribbons and looked very nice."
+
+"Why, he's lame of a leg," guffawed the two farming-men. "See, missy, he
+hirples on three."
+
+"I can't run very fast," said Daisy, "and when I'm old enough to,
+perhaps his leg will be well."
+
+"Why, you don't want this old thing for a play-fellow, child?" said the
+farmer.
+
+"I do! I do!" wept Daisy.
+
+"But why, in the name of whims and whamsies?"
+
+"Because I love him," said Daisy.
+
+When it comes to this with the heart, argument is wasted on the head;
+but the farmer-went on: "Why he's neither useful nor ornamental. He's
+been a good dog in his day, I dare say; but now--"
+
+At this moment Flaps threw his head up in the air and sniffed, and his
+one eye glared, and he set his teeth and growled.
+
+He smelt the gipsy, and the gipsy's black pipe, and every hair stood on
+end with rage.
+
+"The dog's mad!" cried the swineherd, seizing a pitchfork.
+
+"You're a fool," said the farmer (who wasn't). "There's some one behind
+that haystack, and the old watch-dog's back is up. See! there he runs;
+and as I'm a sinner, it's that black rascal who was loitering round, the
+day my ricks were fired, and you lads let him slip. Off after him, for I
+fancy I see smoke." And the farmer flew to his haystacks.
+
+Hungry and tired as he was, Flaps would have pursued his old enemy, but
+Daisy would not let him go. She took him by the ear and led him indoors
+to breakfast instead. She had a large basin of bread-and-milk, and she
+divided this into two portions, and gave one to Flaps and kept the other
+for herself. And as she says she loves Flaps, I leave you to guess who
+got most bread-and-milk.
+
+That was how the gipsy came to live for a time in the county gaol, where
+he made mouse-traps rather nicely for the good of the rate-payers.
+
+And that was how Flaps, who had cared so well for others, was well cared
+for himself, and lived happily to the end of his days.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Why, it's in print!" said Father Cock; "and I said as plain as any cock
+could crow, that it was a secret. Now, who let it out?"
+
+"Don't talk to me about secrets," said the fair foreigner; "I never
+trouble my head about such things."
+
+"Some people are very fond of drawing attention to their heads," said
+the common hen; "and if other people didn't think more of a great
+unnatural-looking chignon than of all the domestic virtues put together,
+they might have their confidences respected."
+
+"I's all very well," said Father Cock, "but you're all alike. There's
+not a hen can know a secret without going and telling it."
+
+"Well, come!" said a little Bantam hen, who had newly arrived;
+"whichever hen told it, the cock must have told it first."
+
+"What's that ridiculous nonsense your talking?" cried the cock; and he
+ran at her and pecked her well with his beak.
+
+"Oh! oh! oh!" cried the Bantam.
+
+Dab, dab, dab, pecked the cock.
+
+"Now! has anybody else got anything to say on the subject?"
+
+But nobody had. So he flew up on to the wall, and cried
+"Cock-a-doodle-doo!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+A WEEK SPENT IN A GLASS POND.
+
+BY THE GREAT WATER-BEETLE.
+
+
+
+Very few beetles have ever seen a Glass Pond. I once spent a week in
+one, and though I think, with good management, and in society suitably
+selected, it may be a comfortable home enough, I advise my
+water-neighbours to be content with the pond in the wood.
+
+The story of my brief sojourn in the Glass Pond is a story with a moral,
+and it concerns two large classes of my fellow-creatures: those who live
+in ponds and--those who don't. If I do not tell it, no one else will.
+Those connected with it who belong to the second class (namely, Francis,
+Molly, and the learned Doctor, their grandfather) will not, I am sure.
+And as to the rest of us, there is none left but--
+
+However, that is the end of my tale, not the beginning.
+
+The beginning, as far as I am concerned, was in the Pond. It is very
+difficult to describe a pond to people who cannot live under water, just
+as I found it next door to impossible to make a minnow I knew believe in
+dry land. He said, at last, that perhaps there might be some little
+space beyond the pond in hot weather, when the water was low; and that
+was the utmost that he would allow. But of all cold-blooded
+unconvinceable creatures, the most obstinate are fish.
+
+Men are very different. They do not refuse to believe what lies beyond
+their personal experience. I respected the learned Doctor, and was
+really sorry for the disadvantages under which he laboured. That a
+creature of his intelligence should have only two eyes, and those not
+even compound ones--that he should not be able to see under water or in
+the dark--that he should not only have nothing like six legs, but be
+quite without wings, so that he could not even fly out of his own window
+for a turn in the air on a summer's evening--these drawbacks made me
+quite sorry for him; for he had none of the minnow's complacent
+ignorance. He knew my advantages as well as I knew them myself, and bore
+me no ill-will for them.
+
+"The _Dyticus marginalis_, or Great Water-Beetle," I have heard him say,
+in the handsomest manner, "is equally at home in the air, or in the
+water. Like all insects in the perfect state, it has six legs, of which
+the hindmost pair are of great strength, and fringed so as to serve as
+paddles. It has very powerful wings, and, with Shakespeare's witches, it
+flies by night. It has two simple, and two sets of compound eyes. When
+it goes below water, it carries a stock of air with it, on the
+diving-bell principle; and when this is exhausted, comes to the surface,
+tail uppermost, for a fresh supply. It is the most voracious of the
+carnivorous water-beetles."
+
+The last sentence is rather an unkind reflection on my good appetite,
+but otherwise the Doctor spoke handsomely of me, and without envy.
+
+And yet I am sure it could have been no matter of wonder if my compound
+eyes, for instance, had been a very sore subject with a man who knew of
+them, and whose one simple pair were so nearly worn out.
+
+More than once, when I have seen the old gentleman put a green shade on
+to his reading-lamp, and glasses before his eyes, I have felt inclined
+to hum,--"Ah, my dear Doctor, if you could only take a cool turn in the
+pond! You would want no glasses or green shades, where the light comes
+tenderly subdued through water and water-weeds."
+
+Indeed, after living, as I can, in all three--water, dry land, and
+air,--I certainly prefer to be under water. Any one whose appetite is as
+keen, and whose hind-legs are as powerful as mine, will understand the
+delights of hunting, and being hunted, in a pond; where the light comes
+down in fitful rays and reflections through the water, and gleams among
+the hanging roots of the frog-bit, and the fading leaves of the
+water-starwort, through the maze of which, in and out, hither and
+thither, you pursue, and are pursued, in cool and skilful chase, by a
+mixed company of your neighbours, who dart, and shoot, and dive, and
+come and go, and any one of whom at any moment may either eat you or be
+eaten by you.
+
+And if you want peace and quiet, where can one bury oneself so safely
+and completely as in the mud? A state of existence, without mud at the
+bottom, must be a life without repose.
+
+I was in the mud one day, head downwards, when human voices came to me
+through the water. It was summer, and the pond was low at the time.
+
+"Oh, Francis! Francis! The Water-Soldier[D] is in flower."
+
+"Hooray! Dig him up for the aquarium! Grandfather says it's very
+rare--doesn't he?"
+
+"He says it's not at all common; and there's only one, Francis. It
+would be a pity if we didn't get it up by the roots, and it died."
+
+"Nonsense, Molly. I'll get it up. But let's get the beasts first. You
+get the pickle-jar ready, whilst I fix the stick on to the colander."
+
+"Does cook know you've taken it, Francis?"
+
+"By this time she does, I should think. Look here, Molly--I wish you
+would try and get this stick right. It wants driving through the
+handles. I'm just going to have a look at the Water-Soldier."
+
+"You always give me the work to do," Molly complained; and as she spoke,
+I climbed up an old stake that was firmly planted in the mud, and seated
+myself on the top, which stood out of the water, and looked at her.
+
+She was a neat-looking little soul, with rosy cheeks, and a resolute
+expression of countenance. She looked redder and firmer than usual as
+she drove the broomstick through the handles of the colander, whilst the
+boy was at the other side of the pond with the Water-Soldier, whose
+maiden-blossom shone white among its sword-leaves.
+
+It shone in the sunshine which came gaily through a gap in the trees,
+and warmed my coat through to my wings, and made the pond look lovely.
+That greedy _Ranatra_, who eats so much, and never looks a bit the more
+solid for his meals, crept up a reed and sunned his wings; the
+water-gnats skimmed and skated about, measuring the surface of the water
+with their long legs; the "boatmen" shot up and down till one was quite
+giddy, showing the white on their bodies, like swallows wheeling for
+their autumn-flight. Even the water-scorpion moved slowly over a sunny
+place from the roots of an arrow-head lily to a dark corner under the
+duck-weed.
+
+"Molly!" shouted the boy; "I wish you'd come and give a pull at the
+Water-Soldier. I've nearly got him up; but the leaves cut my hands, and
+you've got gloves. If the colander is ready, I'll begin to fish. There's
+a beetle on that stick. I wish I were near enough, I could snatch him up
+like anything."
+
+"I wouldn't advise you to," said Molly. "Grandfather says that
+water-beetles have got daggers in their tails. Besides, some of the
+beetles are very greedy and eat the fish."
+
+"The Big Black one doesn't," said Francis. "He said so. _Hydroeus piceus_
+is the name, and I dare say that's the one. It's the biggest of all the
+water-beetles and very harmless."
+
+"He _may_ be a good one," said Molly, looking thoughtfully and
+unmistakably at me, "but then he may be one of the bad ones; and if he
+is, he'll eat everything before him."
+
+But by this time Francis was dipping the colander in and out on the
+opposite side, and she was left to struggle with the Water-Soldier.
+
+"He's up at last," she announced, and the Soldier was landed on the
+bank.
+
+"Come round," said the boy; "I've filled three jars."
+
+"I hope you've been careful, Francis. You know Grandfather says that to
+stock a fresh-water aquarium is like the puzzle of the Fox and the Geese
+and the bag of seed. It's no use our having things that eat each other."
+
+"They must eat something," said the boy; "they're used to it at home;
+and I wish you wouldn't be always cramming Grandfather down my throat. I
+want to do my aquarium my own way; and I gave most towards buying the
+bell-glass, so it's more mine than yours."
+
+"Well, do as you like; only let us have plenty of water-boatmen," said
+Molly.
+
+"I've got half-a-dozen at least; and the last sweep I went very low,
+quite in the mud, and I've got some most horrid things. There's one of
+them like a flat-iron, with pincers at the point."
+
+"That's a water-scorpion. Oh, Francis! he eats dreadfully."
+
+"I don't believe he can, he's so flat. Molly, is that nasty-looking
+thing a dragon-fly larva?"
+
+"I believe it is; for there is the mask. You know his face is so ugly
+nothing would come near him if he didn't wear a mask. Then he lifts it
+up and snaps suddenly; _he_ really _does_ eat everything!"
+
+"Well, I can't help it. I must have him. I want to see him hatch; and I
+shall plant a bullrush for him to climb up."
+
+"I found a caddis-worm, with a beautifully built house, in the roots of
+the Water-Soldier, and I'm going to look along the edge for some shells.
+We must have shell-fish, you know, to keep the aquarium clean. Oh!"
+
+"What is it, Molly? What have you found?"
+
+"Oh, such a lovely spider! A water-spider--a scarlet spider. He's very
+small, but such a colour! Francis dear, may I keep him all to myself? I
+don't think I _can_ let him go in with the others. If the dragon-fly
+larva ate him, I should never forgive myself, and you know you don't
+know for certain that the beetle is _Hydroeus piceus_. I shall give him
+an aquarium of his very own in a green finger-glass, with nothing but a
+little very nice duckweed, and one small snail to keep it clean, like a
+general servant. May I, Francis?"
+
+"By all means. I don't want your scarlet spider. I can get lots more."
+He went on dipping with the colander, and she began to dig up
+water-plants and lay them in a heap. I sat and watched them, but the
+_Ranatra_ got nervous and tried to go below. As usual, the dry bristles
+in his tail would not pierce the water without a struggle, and after
+floundering in the most ludicrous fashion for a few minutes, he fell
+straight into the colander, and was put into one of the pickle-jars.
+
+"I've got enough now," said the boy, "and I want to go home and see
+about my net. I must have some fish. Can you carry the plants, Molly?"
+
+"I'll manage," said Molly. "Now I'm ready."
+
+"Wait a minute, though--I'd forgotten the beetle."
+
+When I heard this I dropped into the water; but somehow or other I
+turned over very clumsily, and, like the _Ranatra_, I fell through into
+the colander, and was transferred to a pickle-jar.
+
+Anything more disagreeable than being shaken up in a glass bottle, with
+beetles, and boatmen, and larvae of all sorts and sizes, including a
+dragon-fly in the second stage of his career, I can hardly imagine. When
+they took us out and put us into the glass pond, matters were certainly
+better, though there is a vast difference between a glass pond and a
+pond in a wood.
+
+The first day it was by no means a bad imitation of a real pond, except
+for the want of a bed of mud. Molly had covered the bottom of the glass
+with gravel which she had steadily washed till water would run clear
+from it, in spite of the impatient exclamations of Francis, that it
+"would do now," and quite regardless of the inconvenience to which I was
+subjected by being kept in the pickle-jar. In this gravel she had
+embedded the roots of some Water Crowfoot and other pond-plants. The
+stones in the middle were nicely arranged, and well covered with moss
+and water-weeds. When water had been poured in up to the brim of the
+bell-glass, and we had been emptied out of the jars, the dragon-fly
+larva got into a good hole among the stones and ate most of the May-fly
+grubs, water-shrimps, and so forth, as they came into sight. I did not
+do badly myself, and only the bigger and stronger members of our society
+and a few skins were there next day, when Francis brought a jar full of
+minnows, a small carp, and a bull's-head, and turned them out in our
+midst.
+
+"How they dart and swim round and round!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Splendid," said Molly. "I _am_ so sorry I am going away just now. You
+will try and keep the water fresh, won't you?"
+
+"Of course I will. And let me have the scarlet spider whilst you are
+away. I couldn't find another."
+
+"Well, if you must; but do take care, Francis. And here are the two
+bits of gutta-percha tubing to make into syphons. You must put them into
+hot water for a minute before you bend them, you know."
+
+"I'll do it to-morrow, Molly; I have nothing else _to_ do, you know,
+because Edward Brown won't be back for three or four days. So we can do
+nothing about the cricket club."
+
+It was on the third day, when both the pieces of gutta-percha tubing
+were in a wash-hand basin of hot water, and the dragon-fly larva and I
+were finishing a minnow, with the help of the water-scorpion, that
+Master Edward Brown arrived unexpectedly, and so pressed his friend
+Francis to come out and consult "just for two minutes," and so delayed
+him when he got him, that the tubing melted into a shapeless lump, and
+the carp died unnoticed by any one but myself.
+
+On the fourth day the glass pond was moved into the conservatory, "to be
+out of the way." The fish were excellent eating, and though the snails
+were at their wits' end as the refuse rotted, and the water became more
+stagnant, and the weeds grew, till all the shell-fish in the pond could
+not have kept the place clean,--I did not mind it myself. As the water
+got low, I found a nice bit of rockwork above water, where I could sit
+by day, and at night the lights from the drawing-room gave an
+indescribable stimulus to my wings, and I sailed in, and flew round and
+round till I was tired, and (forgetting that no pond, not even a bed of
+mud, was below me!) drew in my wings, and dropped sharply down on to the
+floor. To do the family justice, they learned to know the sound of my
+fall, and even the old Doctor himself would go down on hands and knees
+to hunt for me under the sofa, for fear I should be trodden on.
+
+On the fifth day I swallowed the scarlet spider. I hated myself for
+doing it, when I thought of Molly; but the spider was very foolish to
+meet me. He should have kept behind. And if I hadn't eaten him, the
+dragon-fly larva would. What _he_ had eaten, I do not think he could
+have told himself. There was very little left now for any one; even the
+water-scorpion had disappeared.
+
+On the sixth day the glass pond had only two tenants worth speaking
+of--the dragon-fly larva and myself. We had both over-eaten ourselves,
+and for some hours we moved slowly about through the thickening puddle,
+nodding civilly when we passed each other among the feathery sprays of
+the Water Crowfoot. Then I began to get hungry. I knew it by feeling an
+impulse to look out for the dragon-fly larva, and I knew he knew it
+because he began to avoid me.
+
+On the seventh day Molly ran into the conservatory, followed by her
+brother, and uttered a cry of dismay.
+
+"Oh, what a state it's in! Where are the syphons?"
+
+"Why, they melted the day Edward Brown came back. We've been having such
+a lot of cricket, Molly!"
+
+"There isn't a fish left, and it smells horribly."
+
+"I'm very sorry, Molly. Let's throw it out. I don't want Grandfather to
+see it. Let me come."
+
+"No, no, Francis! There may be some left. Yes, there's the beetle. I
+shall put it all in a pail and take it back to the pond. Oh dear! oh
+dear! I can't see anything of the scarlet spider. My beautiful scarlet
+spider! I was so fond of him. Oh, I am so sorry! And no one has watered
+the Soldier, and he's dead too."
+
+"Don't cry, Molly! Please don't cry! I dare say the spider is there,
+only it's so small."
+
+For some time Molly poked carefully here and there, but the spider was
+not to be found, and the contents of the aquarium were carried back to
+the wood.
+
+I was very glad to see the pond again. The water-gnats were taking
+dimensions as usual, a blue-black beetle sat humming on the stake, and
+dragon-flies flitted hungrily about, like splinters of a broken
+rainbow; but the Water-Soldier's place was empty, and it was never
+refilled. He was the only specimen.
+
+Molly was probably in the right when, after a last vain search for the
+scarlet spider, as Francis slowly emptied the pail, she said with a
+sigh,
+
+"What makes me so very sorry is, that I don't think we ought to have
+'collected' things unless we had really attended to them, and knew how
+to keep them alive."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+Footnote D: Water-soldier--_Stratiotes aloides._ A handsome and rare
+plant, of aloe-like appearance, with a white blossom rising in the
+centre of its sword-leaves.
+
+
+
+
+
+AMONG THE MERROWS.
+
+A SKETCH OF A GREAT AQUARIUM.
+
+
+I remember the time when I, and a brother who was with me, devoutly
+believed in a being whom we supposed to live among certain black,
+water-rotted, weed-grown stakes by the sea. These old wooden ruins were,
+I fancy, the remains of some rude pier, and amid them, when the tide was
+low, we used to play, and to pay fancy visits to our fancy friend.
+
+We called her Shriny--why, I know no more than when I first read
+Croker's delightful story of "The Soul Cages" I knew why the Merrow whom
+Jack went to see below the waves was called Coomara.
+
+My remembrance of even what we fancied about Shriny is very dim now; and
+as my brother was only four years old (I was eight), his is not more
+distinct. I know we thought of her, and talked of her, and were always
+eager to visit her supposed abode, and wander together amongst its
+rotten pillars (which, as we were so small, seemed lofty enough in our
+eyes), where the mussels and limpets held tightly on, and the slimy,
+olive-green fucus hung loosely down--a sea-ivy covering ruins made by
+the waves.
+
+I have never been to the place since those days. If Shriny's palace is
+there now at all, I dare say I should find the stakes to be stumps, and
+all the vastness and mystery about them gone for ever. And yet we used
+to pretend to feast with her there. We served up the seed-vessels of the
+fucus as fish. I do not think we really ate them, we only sucked out the
+salt water, and tried to fancy we were enjoying the repast. Once we
+_began_ to eat a limpet!--Beyond that point my memory is dumb.
+
+I wonder how we should have felt if Shriny had really appeared to us, as
+Coomara appeared to Jack Dogherty, and taken us down below the waves, or
+kept us among the stakes of her palace till the tide flooded them, and
+perhaps filled it with wonderful creatures and beautiful things, and
+floated out the dank, dripping fucus into a veil of lace above our
+heads; as our mother used to float out little dirty lumps of seaweed
+into beautiful web-like pictures when she was preserving them for her
+collection.
+
+Shriny never did come, though Mr. Croker says Coomara came to Jack.
+
+Perhaps, young readers, some of you have never read the story of the
+Soul Cages. It is a long one, and I am not going to repeat it here,
+only to say a word or two about it, for which I have a reason.
+
+Jack Dogherty--so the story goes--had always longed to see a Merrow.
+Merrow is the Irish name for seafolk; indeed, it properly means a
+mermaid. And Jack, you know, lived in a fairy tale, and not in lodgings
+at a watering-place on the south coast; so he saw his Merrow, though we
+never saw Shriny.
+
+I do not think any of the after-history of the Merrow is equal to Mr.
+Croker's account of his first appearance to Jack: afterwards "Old Coo"
+becomes more like a tipsy old fisherman than the man-fish that he was.
+
+The first appearance was on the coast to the northward, when "just as
+Jack was turning a point, he saw something, like to nothing he had ever
+seen before, perched upon a rock at a little distance out to sea; it
+looked green in the body, as well as he could discern at that distance,
+and he would have sworn, only the thing was impossible, that it had a
+cocked-hat in its hand. Jack stood for a good half-hour, straining his
+eyes and wondering at it, and all the time the thing did not stir hand
+or foot. At last Jack's patience was quite worn out, and he gave a loud
+whistle and a hail, when the Merrow (for such it was) started up, put
+the cocked-hat on its head, and dived down, head foremost, from the
+rocks."
+
+For a long time Jack could get no nearer view of "the sea-gentleman
+with the cocked-hat," but at last, one stormy day, when he had taken
+refuge in one of the caves along the coast, "he saw, sitting before him,
+a thing with green hair, long green teeth, a red nose, and pig's eyes.
+It had a fish's tail, legs with scales on them, and short arms like
+fins. It wore no clothes, but had the cocked-hat under its arm, and
+seemed engaged thinking very seriously about something."
+
+As I copy these words--_It wore no clothes, but had the cocked-hat under
+its arm, and seemed engaged thinking very seriously about something_--it
+seems to me that the portrait is strangely like something that I have
+seen. And the more I think of it, the more I am convinced that the type
+is familiar to me, and that, though I do not live in a fairy story, I
+have been among the Merrows. And further still that any one who pleases
+may go and see Coomara's cousins any day.
+
+There can be no doubt of it! I have seen a Merrow--several Merrows. That
+unclothed, over-harnessed form is before me now; sitting motionless on a
+rock, "engaged thinking very seriously," till in some sudden impulse it
+rises, turns up its red nose, makes some sharp angular movements with
+head and elbows, and plunges down, with about as much grace as if some
+stiff, red-nosed old admiral, dressed in nothing but cocked-hat,
+spectacles, telescope, and a sword between his legs, were to take a
+header from the quarter-deck into the sea.
+
+I do not want to make a mystery about nothing. I should have resented it
+thoroughly myself when I was young. I make no pretence to have had any
+glimpses of fairyland. I could not see Shriny when I was eight years
+old, and I never shall now. Besides, no one sees fairies now-a-days. The
+"path to bonnie Elfland" has long been overgrown, and few and far
+between are the Princes who press through and wake the Beauties that
+sleep beyond. For compensation, the paths to Mother Nature's Wonderland
+are made broader, easier, and more attractive to the feet of all men,
+day by day. And it is Mother Nature's Merrows that I have seen--in the
+Crystal Palace Aquarium.
+
+How Mr. Croker drew that picture of Coomara the Merrow, when he probably
+never saw a sea crayfish, a lobster, or even a prawn at home, I cannot
+account for, except by the divining and prophetic instincts of genius.
+And when I speak of his seeing a crayfish, a lobster, or a prawn at
+home, I mean at their home, and not at Mr. Croker's. Two very different
+things for our friends the "sea-gentlemen," as to colour as well as in
+other ways. In his own home, for instance, a lobster is of various
+beautiful shades of blue and purple. In Mr. Croker's home he would be
+bright scarlet--from boiling! So would the prawn, and as solid as you
+please; who in his own home is colourless and transparent as any ghost.
+
+Strangely beautiful those prawns are when you see them at home. And that
+one seems to do in the Great Aquarium; though, I suppose, it is much
+like seeing land beasts and birds in the Zoological Gardens--a poor
+imitation of their free life in their natural condition. Still, there is
+no other way in which you can see and come to know these wonderful "sea
+gentlemen" so well, unless you could go, like Jack Dogherty, to visit
+them at the bottom of the sea. And whilst I heartily recommend every one
+who has not seen the Aquarium to visit it as soon as possible, let me
+describe it for the benefit of those who cannot do so at present. It may
+also be of some little use to them hereafter to know what is most worth
+seeing there, and where to look for it.
+
+No sooner have you paid your sixpence at the turnstile which admits you,
+than your eye is caught by what seems to be a large window in the wall,
+near the man who has taken your money. You look through the glass, and
+find yourself looking into a deep sea-pool, with low stone-grey rocks
+studded with sea-anemones in full bloom. There are twenty-one different
+species of sea-anemones in the Aquarium; but those to be seen in this
+particular pool are chosen from about seven of the largest kinds. The
+very biggest, a _Tealia crassicornis_, measures ten inches across when
+he spreads his pearly fingers to their full extent. "In my young days"
+we called him by the familiar name of Crassy; and found him so difficult
+to keep in domestic captivity, that it was delightful to see him
+blooming and thriving as he does in Tank No. 1 of the Great Aquarium.
+His squat build--low and broad--contrasts well with those tall white
+neighbours of his (_Dianthus plumosa_), whose faces are like a plume of
+snowy feathers. All the sea-anemones in this tank have settled
+themselves on the rocks according to their own fancy. They are of lovely
+shades of colour, rosy, salmon-coloured, and pearly-white.
+
+There are more than five thousand sea-anemones of various kinds in the
+Aquarium; and they have an attendant, whose sole occupation is to feed
+them, by means of a pair of long wooden forceps.
+
+Reluctantly breaking away from such old friends, we pass through a door
+into a long vault-like stone passage or hall, down one side of which
+there seem to be high large windows, about as far apart as windows of a
+long room commonly are. Behind each of these is a sea-pool like the
+first one.
+
+Take the first of the lot--Tank No. 2. It is stocked with _Serpulae_.
+Sea-anemones are well-known to most people, but tube-worms are not such
+familiar friends; so I will try to describe this particular kind of
+"sea-gentlemen." The tube-worms are so called because, though they are
+true worms (sea-worms), they do not trust their soft bodies to the sea,
+as our common earth-worms trust theirs in a garden-bed, but build
+themselves tubes inside which they live, popping their heads out at the
+top now and then like a chimney-sweep pushing his brush out at the top
+of a tall round chimney. Now if you can fancy one of our tall round
+manufactory chimneys to be white instead of black, and the round
+chimney-sweep's brush to have lovely gay-coloured feathers all round it
+instead of dirty bristles, or if you can fancy the sweep letting off a
+monster catherine-wheel at the chimney's mouth, you may have some idea
+what a tube-worm's head is like when he pokes it out of his tube.
+
+The _Serpulae_ make their tubes of chalky stuff, something like
+egg-shell; and they stick them on to anything that comes to hand down
+below. Those in the Great Aquarium came from Weymouth. They were dredged
+up with the white pipes or tubes sticking to oyster-shells, old bottles,
+stones, and what not, like bits of maccaroni glued on to old crockery
+sherds. These odds and ends are overgrown, however, with weeds and
+zoophytes, and (like an ugly house covered by creepers) look picturesque
+rather than otherwise. The worms have small bristles down their bodies,
+which serve as feet, and help them to scramble up inside their tubes,
+when they wish to poke their heads out and breathe. These heads are
+delicate, bright-coloured plumes. Each species has its own plume of its
+own special shape and colour. They are only to be seen when the animal
+is alive. A good many little _Serpulae_ have been born in the Aquarium.
+
+Through the next window--Tank No. 3--you may see more tube-worms, with
+ray-like, daisy heads, and soft muddy tubes. They are _Sabellae_.
+
+Have you ever see a "sea-mouse"? Probably you have: preserved in a
+bottle. It is only like a mouse from being about the size of a mouse's
+body, without legs, and with a lot of rainbow-coloured hairs. You may be
+astonished to hear that it is classed among the worms. There is a
+sea-mouse in the Great Aquarium. I did not see him; perhaps because he
+is given to burrowing. If he is not in one of the two tanks just named
+he is probably in No. 21 or No. 25. He is so handsome dead and in a
+bottle, that he must be gorgeous to behold alive and in a pool. You
+should look out for him.
+
+It is a disappointing feature of this water wonderland that some of the
+"sea-gentlemen" are apt to hide, like hobbledehoy children, when
+visitors call. Indeed, a good many of them--such as the swimming-crabs,
+the burrowing-crabs, the sea-scorpions, and the eels--are night-feeders,
+and one cannot expect them to change their whole habits and customs to
+be seen of the British public. Anyhow, whether they hide from custom or
+caprice, they are quite safe from interference. Much happier, in this
+respect, than the beasts in the Zoological Gardens. One may disturb the
+big elephant's repose with umbrella-points, or throw buns at the brown
+bear, but the "sea-gentlemen" are safe in their caves, and humanity
+flattens its nose against the glass wall of separation in vain.
+
+When I looked into Tank No. 5, however, there were several
+swimming-crabs and sea-scorpions to be seen. The sea-scorpions are fish,
+but bold-faced, fiery, greedy little fellows. The swimming-crabs are
+said to be "the largest, strongest, and _hungriest_" of English crabs.
+What a thought for those they live on! Let us picture to ourselves the
+largest, strongest, and _hungriest_ of cannibals! Doubtless he would
+make short work even of the American Giant, as the swimming-crabs, by
+night, devour other crabs, larger but milder-tempered than themselves.
+It speaks volumes for the sea-scorpions, who are small fish, that they
+can hold their own in the same pool with the swimming-crabs.
+
+Tank 4 contains big spider-crabs, who sit with their knees above their
+heads, winking at you with their eyes and feelers; or scramble out
+unexpectedly from dens and caves here and there, high up in the rocky
+sides of the pool.
+
+Nos. 6, 7, and 8 contain fish.
+
+It really is sad to think how completely our ideas on the subject of cod
+spring from the kitchen and the fish-kettle. (As to our cod-liver oil,
+we know no more how much of it has anything to do with cod-fish than we
+can guess where our milk and port-wine come from.) Poor cod! If of a
+certain social standing, it's odds if we will recognize any of him but
+his head and shoulders. I have seen him served up in country inns with a
+pickled walnut in the socket of each eye; and in life, and at home, he
+has the attentive, inquisitive, watchful, humorous eyes common to all
+fishes.
+
+Fishes remind me rather of Chinese, who are also a cold-blooded race:
+slow, watchful, inquisitive, acquisitive, and full of the sense of
+humour. There are fishes in the Great Aquarium whose faces twinkle again
+with quiet fun.
+
+The cod here seemed quite as much interested in looking at us through a
+glass window as we were in looking at them. They are tame, and have
+very large appetites--so tame, and so hungry, that the fish who live
+with them are at a disadvantage at meal-times, and it is feared that
+they must be removed.
+
+These other fish are plaice, soles, brill, turbot, and skate. The skate
+love to lie buried over head and ears in the sand. The faintest outline
+of tail or a flapping fin betrays the spot, and you long for an
+umbrella-poke from some Zoological-Garden-frequenting old lady, to stir
+the lazy creature up; but it is impossible.
+
+Suddenly, when you are as tired of waiting as Jack was when Coomara was
+"engaged thinking," the fin movement becomes more distinct, a cloud of
+sand rises into the water, and a grey-coated skate, with two ornamental
+knobs upon his tail, flaps slowly away across the pool.
+
+Sometimes these flat-fish flap upwards to the surface, poke their noses
+into the other world, and then, like larks, having gone up with effort,
+let themselves easily down again to the ground.
+
+As we were looking into No. 7, an ambitious little sole took into his
+head to climb up the rocks, in the caves of which dwell crusty crabs. By
+marvellously agile doubles of his flat little body, he scrambled a good
+way up. Then he fell, and two or three valiant efforts still proving
+vain, he gave it up.
+
+"He's turned giddy!" shouted a man beside us, who, like every one else,
+was watching the sea-gentlemen with rapt interest.
+
+Why the little sole tried rock climbing I don't know, and I doubt if he
+knew himself.
+
+Tank 7 is full of Basse--glittering fish who keep their silver armour
+clean by scrubbing it among the stones. Like other prettily-dressed
+people, they look out of the window all along.
+
+At Tanks 1, 2, and 3, your chief feelings will be curiosity and
+admiration. The sea-flowers and the worms are rather low in the scale of
+living things. Far be it from you to decide that there are any living
+creatures with whom a loving and intelligent patience will not at last
+enable us to hold communion. But though, when you put the point of your
+little finger towards a Crassy, he gives it a very affectionate squeeze,
+and seems rather anxious to detain it permanently, the balance of
+evidence favours the idea that his appetite rather than his affections
+are concerned, and that he has only mistaken you for his dinner.
+
+At present our intercourse is certainly limited, and though the
+_Serpulae_ and _Sabellae_ have their heads out of their chimneys all
+along, there is no reason to suppose that they take the slightest
+interest in the human beings who peer at them through the glass.
+
+But with the fishes it is quite another thing. When you can fairly look
+into eyes as bright and expressive as your own, a long stride has been
+taken towards friendly relations. You flatten your nose on one side of
+the glass, and Mr. Fish flattens his on the other. If you have the
+stoniest of British stares he will outstare you. You long to scratch his
+back, or show him some similar attention, and (if he be a cod) to ask
+him, as between friends, why on earth (I mean in sea) he wears that
+queer horn under his chin.
+
+Now with the _Crustaceans_(hard-shelled sea-gentlemen) it is different
+again. So far as one feels friendly towards a fish it is a fellow
+feeling. You know people like this or that cod, as one knows people like
+certain sheep, dogs, and horses. And a very short acquaintance with fish
+convinces you that not only is there a type of face belonging to each
+species, but that individual countenances vary, as with us. It is said
+that shepherds know the faces of their sheep as well as of their other
+friends, and I have no doubt that the keeper of the Great Aquarium knows
+his cod apart quite well.
+
+And if one's feeling for the _Crustaceans_--the crabs, lobsters, prawns,
+&c.--is different, it is not because one feels them to be less
+intelligent than fishes, but because their intelligence is altogether a
+mysterious, unfathomable, unmeasurable quantity. There's no saying what
+they don't know. There is no telling how much they can see. And the
+great puzzle is what they can be thinking of. For that the spiny
+lobsters are thinking, and "thinking very seriously about something,"
+you can no more doubt than Jack did about the Merrow.
+
+The spiny lobsters (commonly, but erroneously called craw-fish or
+cray-fish) and the common lobsters are in Tank No. 9.
+
+Ah! that is a wonderful pool. The first glimpse of the spiny lobsters is
+enough for any one who has read of Coomara. We are among the Merrows at
+last.
+
+I don't know that Coomara was a lobster, but I think he must have been a
+crustacean. Even his green hair reminds one of the spider-crabs; though
+matter-of-fact naturalists tell us that _their_ green hair is only
+seaweed which grows luxuriantly on their shells from their quiet habits,
+and because they are not given to burrowing, or cleaning themselves
+among the stones like the silver-coated basse. At one time, by the bye,
+it was supposed that they dressed themselves in weeds, whence they were
+called "vanity-crabs."
+
+But the spiny lobsters--please to look at them, and see if you can so
+much as guess their age, their capabilities, or their intentions. I
+fancy that the difference between the feelings with which they and the
+fishes inspire us is much the same as that between our mental attitude
+towards hill-men or house-elves, and towards men and women.
+
+The spiny lobsters are red. The common lobsters are blue. The spiny
+lobsters are large, their eyes are startlingly prominent, their powerful
+antennae are longer and redder than Coomara's nose, and wave about in an
+inquisitive and somewhat threatening manner. When four or five of them
+are gathered together in the centre of the pool, sitting solemnly on
+their tails, which are tucked neatly under them, each with his ten sharp
+elbows a-kimbo "engaged thinking" (and perhaps talking) "very seriously
+about something," it is an impressive but _uncanny_ sight.
+
+We witnessed such a conclave, sitting in a close circle, face to face,
+waving their long antennae; and as we watched, from the shadowy caves
+above another merrow appeared. How he ever got his cumbersome coat of
+mail, his stiff legs, and long spines safely down the face of the cliff
+is a mystery. But he scrambled down ledge by ledge, bravely, and in some
+haste. He knew what the meeting was about, though we did not, and soon
+took his place, arranged his tail, his scales, his elbows, his
+cocked-hat, and what not, and fell a-thinking, like the rest. We left
+them so.
+
+Most of the common lobsters were in their caves, from which they
+watched this meeting of the reds with fixed attention.
+
+In their dark-blue coats, peering with their keen eyes from behind
+jutting rocks and the mouths of sea caverns, they looked somewhat like
+smuggler sailors!
+
+Tanks 10 to 13 have fish in them. The Wrasses are very beautiful in
+colour. Most gorgeous indeed, if you can look at them in a particular
+way. Tank 32 has been made on purpose to display them. It is in another
+room.
+
+No tank in the Aquarium is more popular than Tank 14. Enthusiastic
+people will sit down here with needlework or luncheon, and calmly wait
+for a good view of--the cuttle-fish!
+
+Cuttle is the name for the whole race of cephalopods, and is supposed to
+be a corruption of the word cuddle, in the sense of hugging.
+
+They are curious creatures, the one who favoured us with a good view of
+him being very like a loose red velvet pincushion with eight legs, and
+most of the bran let out.
+
+Yet this strange, unshapely creature has a distinct brain in a soft kind
+of skull, mandibles like a parrot, and plenty of sense. His sight,
+hearing, touch, taste, and smell are acute. He lies kicking his legs in
+the doorway of his favourite cavern, which he selected for himself and
+is attached to, for a provokingly long time before he will come out.
+When he does appear, a subdued groan of gratified expectation runs
+through the crowd in front of his window, as head over heels, hand over
+hand, he sprawls downwards, and moves quickly away with the peculiar
+gait induced by having suckers instead of feet to walk with.
+
+Tank 15 contains eels. It seems to be a curious fact that fresh-water
+eels will live in sea-water. I should think, when they have once got
+used to the salt, they must find a pond very tasteless afterwards. They
+are night-feeders, as school-boys know well.
+
+Tank 16. Fish--grey mullet. Tank 17. Prawns.
+
+If with the fishes we had felt with friends, and with the lobsters as if
+with hobgoblins, with the prawns we seemed to find ourselves among
+ghosts.
+
+A tank that seems only a pool for a cuttle-fish, or a cod, is a vast
+region where prawns and shrimps are the inhabitants. The caves look
+huge, and would hold an army of them. The rocks jut boldly out, and
+throw strange shadows on the pool. The light falls effectively from
+above, and in and out and round about go the prawns, with black eyes
+glaring from their diaphanous helmets, in colourless, translucent, if
+not transparent armour, and bristling with spears.
+
+"They are like disembodied spirits," said my husband.
+
+But in a moment more we exclaimed, "It's like a scene from Martin's
+mezzo-tint illustrations of the _Paradise Lost_. They are ghostly hosts
+gathering for battle."
+
+This must seem a most absurd idea in connection with prawns; but if you
+have never seen prawns except at the breakfast-table, you must go to the
+Great Aquarium to learn how impressive is their appearance in real life.
+
+The warlike group which struck us so forcibly had gathered rapidly from
+all parts of the pool upon a piece of flat table-rock that jutted out
+high up. Some unexplained excitement agitated the host; their
+innumerable spear-like antennae moved ceaselessly. From above a ray of
+light fell just upon the table-rock where they were gathered, making the
+waving spears glitter like the bayonet points of a body of troops, and
+forming a striking contrast with the dark cliffs and overshadowed water
+below, from which stragglers were quickly gathering, some paddling
+across the deep pool, others scrambling up the rocks, and all with the
+same fierce and restless expression.
+
+How I longed for a chance of sketching the scene!
+
+Prawns are not quite such colourless creatures in the sea as they are
+here. Why they lose their colour and markings in captivity is not known.
+They seem otherwise well.
+
+They are hungry creatures, and their scent is keen.
+
+The shrimps keep more out of sight; they burrow in the sand a good deal.
+You know one has to look for fresh-water shrimps in a brook if one wants
+to find them.
+
+In Tank 18 are our old friends the hermit-crabs. As a child, I think I
+believed that these curious creatures killed the original inhabitants of
+the shells which they take for their own dwelling. It is pleasant to
+know that this is not the case. The hermit-crab is in fact a
+sea-gentleman, who is so unfortunate as to be born naked, and quite
+unable to make his own clothes, and who goes nervously about the world,
+trying on other people's cast-off coats till he finds one to fit him.
+
+They are funnily fastidious about their shells, feeling one well inside
+and out before they decide to try it, and hesitating sometimes between
+two, like a lady between a couple of becoming bonnets. They have been
+said to be pugnacious; but I fancy that the old name of soldier-crabs
+was given to them under the impression that they killed the former
+proprietors of their shells.
+
+With No. 18 the window tanks come to an end.
+
+In two other rooms are a number of shallow tanks open at the top, in
+which are smaller sea-anemones, star-fish, more crabs, fishes, &c., &c.
+
+Blennies are quaint, intellectual-looking little fish; friendly too,
+and easy to be tamed. In one of Major Holland's charming papers in
+_Science Gossip_ he speaks of a pet blenny of his who was not only tame
+but musical. "He was exceedingly sensitive to the vibrations of stringed
+instruments; the softest note of a violin threw him into a state of
+agitation, and a harsh scrape or a vigorous _staccato_ drove him wild."
+
+In Tank 34 are gurnards, fish-gentlemen, with exquisite blue fins, like
+peacock's feathers.
+
+No. 35 contains dragonets and star-fish. The dragonets are quaint,
+wide-awake little fish. I saw one snap at a big, fat, red star-fish, who
+was sticking to the side of a rock. Why the dragonet snapped at him I
+have no idea. I do not believe he hurt him; but the star-fish gradually
+relaxed his hold, and fell slowly and helplessly on to his back; on
+which the dragonet looked as silly as the Sultan of Casgar's purveyor
+when the hunchback fell beneath his blows. Another dragonet came hastily
+up to see what was the matter; but prudently made off again, and left
+the star-fish and his neighbour as they were. I waited a long time by
+the tank, watching for the result; but in vain. The star-fish, looking
+abjectly silly, lay with his white side up, without an effort to help
+himself. As to the dragonet, he stuck out his nose, fixed his eyes, and
+fell a-thinking. So I left them.
+
+In Tank 38 are some Norwegian lobsters; red and white, very pretty, and
+differing from the English ones in form as well as colour.
+
+The green anemones in Tank 33 are very beautiful.
+
+The arrangement of most of these tanks is temporary. As some
+sea-gentlemen are much more rapacious than others, and as some prey upon
+others, the arranging of them must have been very like the old puzzle of
+the fox, the goose, and the bag of seed. Then when new creatures arrive
+it necessitates fresh arrangements.
+
+There is not much vegetation as yet in the tanks, which may puzzle some
+people who have been accustomed to balance the animal and vegetable life
+in their aquaria by introducing full-grown sea-weeds. But it has been
+found that these often fail, and that it is better to trust to the weeds
+which come of themselves from the action of light upon the invisible
+seeds which float in all sea-water.
+
+The pools are also kept healthy by the water being kept in constant
+motion through the agency of pipes, steam-engines, and a huge reservoir
+of sea-water.
+
+It is not easy to speak with due admiration of the scientific skill, the
+loving patience, the mindfulness of the public good which must have gone
+to the forming of this Public Aquarium. With what different eyes must
+innumerable "trippers" from the less-educated masses of our people look
+into tide pools or crab holes, during their brief holiday at the
+seaside, if they have previously been "trippers" to the Crystal
+Palace, and visited the Great Aquarium.
+
+Let us hope that it may stir up some sight-seers to be naturalists, and
+some naturalists to devote their powers to furthering our too limited
+friendship with the sea-gentry. How much remains to be done may be
+gathered from the fact that we can as yet keep no deep-sea Merrows in
+aquaria, only shore-dwellers will live with us, and not all of these.
+And so insuperable, as yet, are the difficulties of transport, that
+"distinguished foreigners" are rare indeed.
+
+Still, as it stands, this Great Aquarium is wonderful--wonderful
+exceedingly. There is a still greater one at Brighton, holding greater
+wonders--a baby alligator amongst them--and we are very glad to hear
+that one is to be established in Manchester also.
+
+It has been well said that a love of nature is a strong characteristic
+even of the roughest type of Britons. An Englishman's first idea of a
+holiday is to get into the country, even if his second is apt to be a
+search for the country beer-house.
+
+Of birds, and beasts, and trees, and flowers, there is a good deal even
+of rustic lore. Of the wonders of the deep we know much less.
+
+Thousands of us can sing with understanding,
+
+    O Lord, how manifold are thy works!
+    In wisdom hast thou made them all.
+    The earth is full of Thy riches.
+
+Surely hereafter more of us shall swell the antiphon,
+
+    So is the great and wide sea also,
+    Wherein are things creeping innumerable,
+    Both small and great beasts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     NOTE.--A Great Aquarium (and something more) is being made
+     at Naples by a young German naturalist--Dr. Dohrn, of Stettin--at
+     an expense of between L7000 and L8000, nearly all of which comes
+     out of his own pocket. The ground-floor of the building (an area of
+     nearly eight thousand square feet) is to hold the Great Aquarium.
+     It is hoped that the money obtained by opening this to the public
+     will both support the Aquarium itself, and do something towards
+     defraying the expenses of the upper story of the Zoological
+     Station, as it is called. This will contain a scientific library,
+     including Dr. Dohrn's own valuable private collection, and tables
+     for naturalists to work at, furnished with necessary appurtenances,
+     including tanks supplied with a constant stream of sea-water.
+     Sea-fishing and dredging will be carried on in connection with the
+     establishment, to supply subjects for study. Dr. Dohrn proposes to
+     let certain of these tables to governments and scientific
+     societies, who will then have the privilege of giving certificates,
+     which will enable their naturalists to enjoy all the benefits of
+     the institution.
+
+     Surely some new acquaintances will be made among the sea-gentry in
+     this paradise of naturalists!
+
+
+
+
+
+TINY'S TRICKS AND TOBY'S TRICKS.
+
+TINY.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Oh Toby, my dear old Toby, you portly and princely Pug!
+
+"You know it's bad for you to lie in the fender:--Father says that's
+what makes you so fat--and I want you to come and sit with me on the
+Kurdistan rug.
+
+"Put your lovely black nose in my lap, and I'll count your great velvet
+wrinkles, and comfort you with kisses.
+
+"If you'll only keep out of the fender--Father says you'll have a fit if
+you don't!--and give good advice to your poor Little Missis.
+
+"Father says you are the wisest creature he knows, and you are but eight
+years old, and three months ago I was six.
+
+"And yet Mother says I'm the silliest little girl that she ever met
+with, because I am always picking up tricks.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"She does not know where I learnt to stand on one leg (unless it was
+from a goose), but it has made one of my shoulders stick out more than
+the other.
+
+"It wasn't the goose who taught me to whistle up and down-stairs. I
+learnt that last holidays from my brother.
+
+"The baker's man taught me to put my tongue in my cheek when I'm writing
+copies, for I saw him do it when he was receipting a bill.
+
+"And I learnt to wrinkle my forehead, and squeeze up my eyes, and make
+faces with my lips by imitating the strange doctor who attended us when
+we were ill.
+
+"It was Brother Jack himself who showed me that the way to squint is to
+look at both sides of your nose.
+
+"And then, Toby--would you believe it?--he turned round last holidays
+and said--'Look here, Tiny, if the wind changes when you're making that
+face it'll stay there, and remember you can't squint properly and keep
+your eye on the weathercock at the same time to see how it blows.'
+
+"But boys are so mean!--and I catch stammering from his school
+friend--'_Tut-tut-tut-tut-Tom_,' as we call him--but I soon leave it off
+when he goes.
+
+"I did not learn stooping and poking out my chin from any one; it came
+of itself. It is so hard to sit up; but Mother says that much my worst
+trick
+
+"Is biting my finger nails; and I've bitten them nearly all down to the
+quick.
+
+"She says if I don't lose these tricks, and leave off learning fresh
+ones, I shall never grow up like our pretty great-great-grandmamma.
+
+"Do you know her, dear Toby? I don't think you do. I don't think you
+ever look at pictures, intelligent as you are!
+
+"It's the big portrait, by Romney, of a beautiful lady, sitting
+beautifully up, with her beautiful hands lying in her lap.
+
+"Looking over her shoulder, out of lovely eyes, with a sweet smile on
+her lips, in the old brocade Mother keeps in the chest, and a pretty
+lace cap.
+
+"I should very much like to be like her when I grow up to that age;
+Mother says she was twenty-six.
+
+"And of course I know she would not have looked so nice in her picture
+if she'd squinted, and wrinkled her forehead, and had one shoulder out,
+and her tongue in her cheek, and a round back, and her chin poked, and
+her fingers all swollen with biting;--but, oh, Toby, you clever Pug! how
+am I to get rid of my tricks?
+
+"That is, if I must give them up; but it seems so hard to get into
+disgrace
+
+"For doing what comes natural to one, with one's own eyes, and legs, and
+fingers, and face."
+
+
+TOBY.
+
+"Remove your arms from my neck, Little Missis--I feel unusually
+apoplectic--and let me take two or three turns on the rug,
+
+"Whilst I turn the matter over in my mind, for never was there so
+puzzled a Pug!
+
+"I am, as your respected Father truly observes, a most talented
+creature.
+
+"And as to fit subjects for family portraits and personal
+appearance--from the top of my massive brow to the tip of my curly
+tail, I believe myself to be perfect in every feature.
+
+"And when my ears are just joined over my forehead like a black velvet
+cap, I'm reckoned the living likeness of a late eminent divine and once
+popular preacher.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Did your great-great-grandmamma ever take a prize at a show? But let
+that pass--the real question is this:
+
+"How is it that what I am most highly commended for, should in your
+case be taken amiss?
+
+"Why am I reckoned the best and cleverest of dogs? Because I've picked
+up tricks so quickly ever since I was a pup.
+
+"And if I couldn't wrinkle my forehead and poke out my chin, and grimace
+at the judges, do you suppose I should ever have been--Class Pug. First
+Prize--Champion and Gold Cup?
+
+"We have one thing in common--I do _not_ find it easy to sit up.
+
+"But I learned it, and so will you. I can't imagine worse manners than
+to put one's tongue in one's cheek; as a rule, I hang mine gracefully
+out on one side.
+
+"And I've no doubt it's a mistake to gnaw your fingers. I gnawed a good
+deal in my puppyhood, but chewing my paws is a trick that I never tried.
+
+"How you stand on one leg I cannot imagine; with my figure it's all I
+can do to stand upon four.
+
+"I balance biscuit on my nose. Do you? I jump through a hoop (an
+atrocious trick, my dear, after one's first youth--and a full meal!)--I
+bark three cheers for the Queen, and I shut the dining-room door.
+
+"I lie flat on the floor at the word of command--In short, I've as many
+tricks as you have, and every one of them counts to my credit;
+
+"Whilst yours--so you say--only bring you into disgrace, which I could
+not have thought possible if you had not said it.
+
+"Indeed--but for the length of my experience and the solidity of my
+judgment--this would tempt me to think your mamma a very foolish person,
+and to advise you to disobey her; but I do _not_, Little Missis, for I
+know
+
+"That if you belong to good and kind people, it is well to let them
+train you up in the way in which they think you should go.
+
+"Your excellent parents trained me to tricks; and very senseless some of
+them seemed, I must say:
+
+"But I've lived to be proud of what I've been taught; and glad too that
+I learned to obey.
+
+"For, depend upon it, if you never do as you're told till you know the
+reason why, or till you find that you must;
+
+"You are much less of a Prize Pug than you might have been if you'd
+taken good government on trust."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Take me back to your arms, Little Missis, I feel cooler, and calmer in
+my mind.
+
+"Yes, there can be no doubt about it. You must do what your mother
+tells you, for you know that she's wise and kind.
+
+"You must take as much pains to _lose your_ tricks as I took to _learn
+mine_, long ago;
+
+"And we may all live to see you yet--'Class, Young Lady. First Prize.
+Gold Medal--of a Show.'"
+
+
+TINY.
+
+"Oh, Toby, my dear old Toby, you wise and wonderful Pug!
+
+"Don't struggle off yet, stay on my knee for a bit, you'll be much
+hotter in the fender, and I want to give you a great, big hug.
+
+"What are you turning round and round for? you'll make yourself giddy,
+Toby. If you're looking for your tail, it is there, all right.
+
+"You can't see it for yourself because you're so fat, and because it is
+curled so tight.
+
+"I dare say you could play with it, like Kitty, when you were a pup, but
+it must be a long time now since you've seen it.
+
+"It's rather rude of you, Mr. Pug, to lie down with your back to me, and
+a grunt, but I know you don't mean it.
+
+"I wanted to hug you, Toby, because I do thank you for giving me such
+good advice, and I know every word of it's true.
+
+"I mean to try hard to follow it, and I'll tell you what I shall do.
+
+"Nurse wants to put bitter stuff on the tips of my fingers, to cure me
+of biting them, and now I think I shall let her.
+
+"I know they're not fit to be seen, but she says they would soon become
+better.
+
+"I mean to keep my hands behind my back a good deal till they're well,
+and to hold my head up, and turn out my toes; and every time I give way
+to one of my tricks, I shall go and stand (_on both legs_) before the
+picture, and confess it to great-great-grandmamma.
+
+"Just fancy if I've no tricks left this time next year, Toby! Won't that
+show how clever we are?
+
+"I for trying so hard to do what I'm told, and you for being so wise
+that people will say--'That sensible pug cured that silly little girl
+when not even her mother could mend her.'
+
+"--Ah! Bad Dog! Where are you slinking off to?--Oh, Toby, darling! do,
+_do_ take a little of your own good advice, and try to cure yourself of
+lying in the fender!"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: THE OWL IN THE IVY BUSH]
+
+
+
+
+THE OWL IN THE IVY BUSH;
+
+OR,
+
+THE CHILDREN'S BIRD OF WISDOM.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+     "Hoot toots, man, yon's a queer bird!"
+
+     _Bonnie Scotland._
+
+I AM an Owl; a very fluffy one, in spite of all that that Bad
+Boy pulled out! I live in an Ivy Bush. Children are nothing to me,
+naturally, so it seems strange that I should begin, at my time of life,
+to observe their little ways and their humours, and to give them good
+advice.
+
+And yet it is so. I am the Friend of Young People. In my flight abroad I
+watch them. As I sit meditating in my Ivy Bush, it is their little
+matters which I turn over in my fluffy head. I have established a
+letter-box for their communications at the Hole in the Tree. No other
+address will find me.
+
+It is well known that I am a Bird of Wisdom. I am also an Observing
+Bird; and though my young friends may think I see less than I do,
+because of my blinking, and because I detest that vulgar glare of bright
+light without which some persons do not seem able to see what goes on
+around them, I would have children to know that if I can blink on
+occasion, and am not apt to let every starer read my counsel in my eyes,
+I am wide awake all the same. I am on the look-out when it's so dark
+that other folk can't see an inch before their noses, and (a word to the
+foolish and naughty!) I can see what is doing behind my back. And
+Wiseacre, Observer, and Wide-awake--I am the Children's Owl.
+
+Before I open my mouth on their little affairs, before even I open my
+letters (if there are any waiting for me) I will explain how it came
+about that I am the Children's Owl.
+
+It is all owing to that little girl; the one with the fluffy hair and
+the wise eyes. As an Observer I have noticed that not only I, but other
+people, seem to do what she wants, and as a Wiseacre I have reflected
+upon it as strange, because her temper is as soft and fluffy as her hair
+(which mine is not), and she always seems ready to give way to others
+(which is never my case--if I can help it). On the occasion I am about
+to speak of, I could _not_ help it.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It was last summer that that Bad Boy caught me, and squeezed me into a
+wicker cage. Little did I think I should ever live to be so poked out,
+and rummaged, and torn to shreds by such a thing as a boy! I bit him,
+but he got me into the cage and put a cloth over it. Then he took me to
+his father, who took me to the front door of the house, where he is
+coachman and gardener, and asked for Little Miss to come out and see the
+new pet Tom had caught for her.
+
+"It's a nasty-tempered brute, but she's such a one for taming things,"
+said the coachman, whipping off the cloth to show me to the housemaid,
+and letting in a glare of light that irritated me to a frenzy. I flew at
+the housemaid, and she flew into the house. Then I rolled over and
+growled and hissed under my beak, and tried to hide my eyes in my
+feathers.
+
+"Little Miss won't tame me," I muttered.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+She did not try long. When she heard of me she came running out, the
+wind blowing her fluffy hair about her face, and the sun shining on it.
+Fluffed out by the wind, and changing colour in the light and shade, the
+hair down her back is not entirely unlike the feathers of my own, though
+less sober perhaps in its tints. Like mine it makes a small head look
+large, and as she had big wise eyes, I have seen creatures less like an
+owl than Little Miss. Her voice is not so hoarse as mine. It is clear
+and soft, as I heard when she spoke:
+
+"Oh, _how_ good of you! And how good of Tom! I do so love owls. I
+always get Mary to put the silver owl by me at luncheon, though I am
+not allowed to eat pepper. And I have a brown owl, a china one, sitting
+on a book for a letter weight. He came from Germany. And Captain Barton
+gave me an owl pencil-case on my birthday, because I liked hearing
+about his real owl, but, oh, I never hoped I should have a real owl of
+my very own. It _was_ kind of Tom."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+To hear that Bad Boy called kind was too much for endurance, and I let
+them see how savage I felt. If the wicker work had not been very strong
+the cage would not have held me.
+
+"He's a Tartar," said the coachman.
+
+"Oh no, Williams!" said Little Miss, "he's only frightened by the light.
+Give me the cloth, please."
+
+"Take care, Miss. He'll bite you," cried the coachman, as she put the
+cloth over the cage, and then over her own head.
+
+"No he won't! I don't mind his snapping and hissing. I want him to see
+me, and know me. Then perhaps he'll get to like me, and be tame, and sit
+on the nursery clock and look wise. Captain Barton's owl used to sit on
+his clock. Poor fellow! Dear old owlie! Don't growl, my owl. Can you
+hoot, darling? I should like to hear you hoot."
+
+Sometimes as I sit in my Ivy Bush, and the moon shines on the spiders'
+webs and reminds me of the threads of her hair, on a mild, sleepy night,
+if there's nothing stirring but the ivy boughs; sitting, I say, blinking
+between a dream and a doze, I fancy I see her face close to mine, as it
+was that day with the wicker work between. Our eyes looking at each
+other, and our fluffiness mixed up by the wind. Then I try to remember
+all the kind things she said to me to coax me to leave my ivy bush, and
+go to live on the nursery clock. But I can't remember half. I was in
+such a rage at the time, and when you are in a rage you miss a good
+deal, and forget a good deal.
+
+I know that at last she left off talking to me, and I could see her wise
+eyes swimming in tears. Then she left me alone under the cloth.
+
+"Well, Miss," said the coachman, "you don't make much of him, do ye?
+He's a Tartar, Miss, I'm afraid."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"I think, Williams, that he's too old. Captain Barton's owl was a little
+owlet when he first got him. I shall never tame this one, Williams, and
+I never was so disappointed in all my life. Captain Barton said he kept
+an owl to keep himself good and wise, because nobody could be foolish in
+the face of an owl sitting on his clock. He says both his godfathers are
+dead, and he has taken his owl for his godfather. These are his jokes,
+Williams, but I had set my heart on having an owl on the nursery clock.
+I do think I have never wished so much for anything in the world as that
+Tom's owl would be our Bird of Wisdom. But he never will. He will never
+let me tame him. He wants to be a wild owl all his life. I love him very
+much, and I should like him to have what he wants, and not be miserable.
+Please thank Tom very much, and please ask him to let him go."
+
+"I'm sorry I brought him, Miss, to trouble you," said the coachman. "But
+Tom won't let him go. He'd a lot of trouble catching him, and if he's no
+good to you, Tom'll be glad of him to stuff. He's got some glass eyes
+out of a stuffed fox the moths ate, and he's bent on stuffing an owl, is
+Tom. The eyes would be too big for a pheasant, but they'll look well
+enough in an owl, he thinks."
+
+My hearing is very acute, and not a word of that Bad Boy's brutal
+intentions was lost on me. I shrunk among my feathers and shivered with
+despair; but when I heard the voice of Little Miss I rounded my ear once
+more.
+
+"No, Williams, no! He must not be stuffed. Oh, please beg Tom to come
+to me. Perhaps I can give him something to persuade him not. If he must
+stuff an owl, please, please let him stuff a strange owl. One I haven't
+made friends with. Not this one. He is very wild, but he is very lovely
+and soft, and I do so want him to be let go."
+
+"Well, Miss, I'll send Tom, and you can settle it with him. All I say,
+he's a Tartar, and stuffing's too good for him."
+
+Whether she bribed Tom, or persuaded him, I don't know, but Little Miss
+got her way, and that Bad Boy let me go, and I went back to my Ivy Bush.
+
+
+
+
+OWLHOOT I.
+
+
+    "What can't be cured must be endured."
+    _Old Proverb._
+
+
+It was the wish to see Little Miss once more that led my wings past her
+nursery window; besides, I had a curiosity to look at the clock.
+
+It is an eight-day clock, in a handsome case, and would, undoubtedly,
+have been a becoming perch for a bird of my dignified appearance, but I
+will not describe it to-day. Nor will I speak of my meditations as I sit
+in my Ivy Bush like any other common owl, and reflect that if I had not
+had my own way, but had listened to Little Miss, I might have sat on an
+Eight-day Clock, and been godfather to the children. It is not seemly
+for an owl to doubt his own wisdom, but as I have taken upon me, for the
+sake of Little Miss, to be a child's counsellor, I will just observe,
+in passing, that though it is very satisfactory at the time to get your
+own way, you may live to wish that you had taken other folk's advice
+instead.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+From that nursery I have taken flight to others. I sail by the windows,
+and throw a searching eye through these bars which are, I believe,
+placed there to keep top-heavy babies from tumbling out. Sometimes I
+peer down the chimney. From the nook of a wall or the hollow of a tree,
+I overlook the children's gardens and playgrounds. I have an eye to
+several schools, and I fancy (though I may be wrong) that I should look
+well seated on the top of an easel--just above the black-board, with a
+piece of chalk in my feathery foot.
+
+Not that I have any notion of playing school-master, or even of advising
+school-masters and parents how to make their children good and wise. I
+am the Children's Owl--their very own--and all my good advice is
+intended to help them to improve themselves.
+
+It is wonderful how children _do_ sometimes improve! I knew a fine
+little fellow, much made of by his family and friends, who used to be so
+peevish about all the little ups and downs of life, and had such a
+lamentable whine in his voice when he was thwarted in any trifle, that
+if you had heard without seeing him, you'd have sworn that the most
+miserable wretch in the world was bewailing the worst of catastrophes
+with failing breath. And all the while there was not a handsomer,
+healthier, better fed, better bred, better dressed, and more dearly
+loved little boy in all the parish. When you might have thought, by the
+sound of it, that some starving skeleton of a creature was moaning for a
+bit of bread, the young gentleman was only sobbing through the soap and
+lifting his voice above the towels, because Nurse would wash his fair
+rosy cheeks. And when cries like those of one vanquished in battle and
+begging and praying for his life, rang through the hall and up the front
+stairs, it proved to be nothing worse than Master Jack imploring his
+friends to "_please, please_" and "_do, do_," let him stay out to run in
+a final "go as you please" race with the young Browns (who dine a
+quarter of an hour later), instead of going in promptly when the gong
+sounded for luncheon.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Now the other day I peeped into a bedroom of that little boy's home. The
+sun was up, and so was Jack, but one of his numerous Aunts was not. She
+was in bed with a headache, and to this her pale face, her eyes
+shunning the light like my own, and her hair restlessly tossed over the
+pillow bore witness. When a knock came on the bedroom door, she started
+with pain, but lay down again and cried--"Come in!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The door opened, but no one came in; and outside the voices of the
+little boy and his nurse were audible.
+
+"I want to show her my new coat."
+
+"You can't, Master Jack. Your Aunt's got a dreadful headache, and can't
+be disturbed."
+
+No peevish complaints from Jack: only a deep sigh.
+
+"I'm very sorry about her headache; and I'm very very sorry about my
+coat. For I am going out, and it will never be so new again."
+
+His Aunt spoke feebly.
+
+"Nurse, I must see his coat. Let him come in."
+
+Enter Jack.
+
+It was his first manly suit, and he was trying hard for a manly soul
+beneath it, as a brave boy should. He came in very gently, but with
+conscious pride glowing in his rosy cheeks and out of his shining eyes.
+His cheeks were very red, for a step in life is a warming thing, and so
+is a cloth suit when you've been used to frocks.
+
+It was a bottle-green coat, with large mother-o'-pearl buttons and three
+coachman's capes; and there were leggings to match. The beaver hat, too,
+was new, and becomingly cocked, as he stood by his Aunt's bedside and
+smiled.
+
+"What a fine coat, Jack!"
+
+"Made by a tailor, Auntie Julie. Real pockets!"
+
+"You don't say so!"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Leggings too!" and he stuck up one leg at a sudden right angle on to
+the bed; a rash proceeding, but the boy has a straight little figure,
+and with a hop or two he kept his balance.
+
+"My dear Jack, they are grand. How warm they must keep your legs!"
+
+He shook his beaver hat.
+
+"No. They only tickles. That's what they do."
+
+There was a pause. His Aunt remembered the old peevish ways. She did not
+want to encourage him to discard his winter leggings, and was doubtful
+what to say. But in a moment more his eyes shone, and his face took that
+effulgent expression which some children have when they are resolved
+upon being good.
+
+"--_and as I can't shake off the tickle, I have to bear it_," added the
+little gentleman.
+
+I call him the little gentleman advisedly. There is no stronger sign of
+high breeding in young people, than a cheerful endurance of the rubs of
+life. A temper that fits one's fate, a spirit that rises with the
+occasion. It is this kind of courage which the Gentlemen of England
+have shown from time immemorial, through peace and war, by land and sea,
+in every country and climate of the habitable globe. Jack is a child of
+that Empire on which the sun never sets, and if he live he is like to
+have larger opportunities of bearing discomfort than was afforded by the
+woolly worry of his bottle-green leggings. I am in good hopes that he
+will not be found wanting.
+
+Some such thoughts, I believe, occurred to his Aunt.
+
+"That's right, Jack. What a man you are!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The rosy cheeks became carmine, and Jack flung himself upon his Aunt,
+and kissed her with resounding smacks.
+
+A somewhat wrecked appearance which she presented after this boisterous
+hug, recalled the headache to his mind, and as he settled the beaver
+hat, which had gone astray, he said ruefully,
+
+"Is your headache _very_ bad, Auntie Julie?"
+
+"Rather bad, Jack. _And as I can't shake if off, I have to bear it._"
+
+He went away on tiptoe, and it was only after he had carefully and
+gently closed the bedroom door behind him, that he departed by leaps
+and bounds to show himself in his bottle-green coat and capes, and
+white buttons and leggings to match, and beaver hat to boot, first to
+the young Browns, and after that to the General Public.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+As an Observer, I may say that it was a sight worth seeing; and as a
+Bird of some wisdom, I prophesy well of that boy.
+
+
+PROVERBS.
+
+Fine feathers make fine birds.
+
+Manners make the man.
+
+Clowns are best in their own company; gentlemen are best everywhere.
+
+Where there's a will there's a way.
+
+All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
+
+What can't be cured must be endured.
+
+[Illustration: OWL HOOT NO 2]
+
+
+
+
+OWLHOOT II.
+
+"Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling."
+_The Raven._
+
+"Taffy was a thief."--_Old Song._
+
+
+I find the following letters at the Hole in the Tree.
+
+"X LINES, SOUTH CAMP, ALDERSHOT.
+
+"SIR,--You speak with great feeling of that elevated position
+(I allude, of course, to the top of the eight-day clock), which
+circumstances led you somewhat hastily to decline. It would undoubtedly
+have become you, and less cannot be said for such a situation as the
+summit of an easel, overlooking the blackboard, in an establishment for
+the education of youth. Meanwhile it may interest you to hear of a bird
+(not of your wisdom, but with parts, and a respectable appearance) who
+secured a somewhat similar seat in adopting that kind of home which you
+would not. It was in driving through a wood at some little distance from
+the above address that we found a wounded crow, and brought him home to
+our hut. He became a member of the family, and received the name of
+Slyboots, for reasons with which it is unnecessary to trouble you. He
+was made very welcome in the drawing-room, but he preferred the kitchen.
+The kitchen is a brick room detached from the wooden hut. It was once,
+in fact, an armourer's shop, and has since been converted to a kitchen.
+The floor is rudely laid, and the bricks gape here and there. A barrack
+fender guards the fire-place, and a barrack poker reposes in the fender.
+It is a very ponderous poker of unusual size and the commonest
+appearance, but with a massive knob at the upper end which was wont to
+project far and high above the hearth. It was to this seat that Slyboots
+elevated himself by his own choice, and became the Kitchen Crow. Here he
+spent hours watching the cook, and taking tit-bits behind her back. He
+ate what he could (more, I fear, than he ought), and hid the rest in
+holes and corners. The genial neighbourhood of the oven caused him no
+inconvenience. His glossy coat, being already as black as a coal, was
+not damaged by a certain grimeyness which is undoubtedly characteristic
+of the (late) armourer's shop, of which the chimney is an inveterate
+smoker. Companies of his relatives constantly enter the camp by ways
+over which the sentries have no control (the Balloon Brigade being not
+yet even in the clouds); but Slyboots showed no disposition to join
+them. They flaunt and forage in the Lines, they inspect the ashpits and
+cookhouses, they wheel and manoeuvre on the parades, but Slyboots sat
+serene upon his poker. He had a cookhouse all to himself.... He died. We
+must all die; but we need not all die of repletion, which I fear, was
+his case. He buried his last meal between two bricks in the kitchen
+floor, and covered it very tidily with a bit of newspaper. The poker is
+vacant. Sir, I was bred to the sword and not to the pen, but I have a
+foolish desire for literary fame. I should be better pleased to be in
+print than to be promoted--for that matter one seems as near as the
+other--and my wife agrees with me. She is of a literary turn, and has
+helped me in the composition of this, but we both fear that the story
+having no moral you will not admit it into your Owlhoots. But if your
+wisdom could supply this, or your kindness overlook the defect, it would
+afford great consolation to a bereaved family to have printed a
+biography of the dear deceased. For we were greatly attached to him,
+though he preferred the cook. I can at any rate give you my word as a
+man of honour that these incidents are true, though, out of soldierly
+modesty, I will not trouble you with my name, but with much respect
+subscribe myself by that of
+
+"SLYBOOTS."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The gallant officer is too modest. This biography is not only true but
+brief, and these are rare merits in a memoir. As to the moral--it is not
+far to seek. Dear children, for whom I hoot! avoid greediness. If
+Slyboots had eaten tit-bits in moderation, he might be sitting on the
+poker to this day. I have great pleasure in making his brief career
+public to the satisfaction of his gallant friend, and I should be glad
+to hear that the latter had got his step by the same post as his
+Owlhoot.
+
+The second letter is much farther from literary excellence than the
+first. I fear this little boy plays truant from school as well as taking
+apples which do not belong to him. It is high time that he learnt to
+spell, and also to observe the difference between _meum_ and _tuum_.
+From not being well grounded on these two points, many boys have lost
+good situations in life when they grew up to be men.
+
+"deer mister howl,--as you say you see behind your bak i spose its you
+told varmer jones of me for theres a tree with a whole in it just behind
+the orchurd he wolloped I shameful and I'll have no more of his apples
+they be a deal sowerer than yud think though they look so red, but do
+you call yourself a childerns friend and tell tails i dont i can tell
+you.
+
+"TOM TURNIP."
+
+
+
+
+Richard Clay & Sons, Ltd., London & Bungay.
+
+The present Series of Mrs. Ewing's Works is the only authorized,
+complete, and uniform Edition published.
+
+It will consist of 18 volumes, Small Crown 8vo, at 2s. 6d. per vol.,
+issued, as far as possible, in chronological order, and these will
+appear at the rate of two volumes every two months, so that the Series
+will be completed within 18 months. The device of the cover was
+specially designed by a Friend of Mrs. Ewing.
+
+The following is a list of the books included in the Series--
+
+1. MELCHIOR'S DREAM, AND OTHER TALES.
+
+2. MRS. OVERTHEWAY'S REMEMBRANCES.
+
+3. OLD-FASHIONED FAIRY TALES.
+
+4. A FLAT IRON FOR A FARTHING.
+
+5. THE BROWNIES, AND OTHER TALES.
+
+6. SIX TO SIXTEEN.
+
+7. LOB LIE-BY-THE-FIRE, AND OTHER TALES.
+
+8. JAN OF THE WINDMILL.
+
+9. VERSES FOR CHILDREN, AND SONGS.
+
+10. THE PEACE EGG--A CHRISTMAS MUMMING
+    PLAY--HINTS FOR PRIVATE
+    THEATRICALS, &c.
+
+11. A GREAT EMERGENCY, AND OTHER
+    TALES.
+
+12. BROTHERS OF PITY, AND OTHER TALES
+    OF BEASTS AND MEN.
+
+13. WE AND THE WORLD, Part I.
+
+14. WE AND THE WORLD, Part II.
+
+15. JACKANAPES--DADDY DARWIN'S DOVECOTE--THE
+    STORY OF A SHORT LIFE.
+
+16. MARY'S MEADOW, AND OTHER TALES
+    OF FIELDS AND FLOWERS.
+
+17. MISCELLANEA, including The Mystery of the
+    Bloody Hand--Wonder Stories--Tales of the
+    Khoja, and other translations.
+
+18. JULIANA HORATIA EWING AND HER
+    BOOKS, with a selection from Mrs. Ewing's
+    Letters.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+S.P.C.K., NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, LONDON, W.C.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BROTHERS OF PITY AND OTHER TALES OF
+BEASTS AND MEN***
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