BIG DOG."

And again, a little later, we have the following:

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"Nine months have passed since I recorded the death of my faithful little Skye terrier Fido, and now his old companion Growl lies beside him beneath the limes. He was born at Wandsworth, in September 1862, so he has had a fairly long life for a little dog. I was present at his birth, and christened him Growl, because his first act was to growl at his mother for bringing him into the world without his leave. Poor old boy, he has growled through life, always most at those he loved best, as is the way with some human cynics; and when he let me touch him without growling, I knew he was in a bad way. A lion was a coward to the little fellow; he would have attacked one without hesitation. I have known him spring from a boat on the Thames to do battle with an angry male swan in the breeding time, when a black retriever in the boat cowered with terror. He has walked with me through many counties of England, sometimes doing forty miles a day with ease, and once when walking through Buckinghamshire, we met Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli, and just such another little dog, in the Hughenden lane, and, although neither he nor I had been introduced, he commenced a conversation at once. Ay, we have had joyous times together, poor little dog; and it is satisfactory to know that, while you shared my gaiety, you had no share in those multitudinous troubles to which man is born."

The beautiful Pyrenean wolf-hound outlived his master a few months.

The praises of these three dogs have been so often said and sung, that I feel it is almost superfluous to make any mention of them : they figure as characters in many of the novels, and have had many verses written about them; but they had so large a share in the history of the eight years of life at the Berkshire cottage, that perhaps the reader may be interested in them. It is only those who really know what it is to have a dog for a friend, that can understand the love there was between these three dogs and their master. When Fido and Growl died, I asked Mortimer Collins to write some in memoriam lines on each of them for Knowl Hill Rhymes, a chronicle in verse of the doings at the cottage; but he, who could write on any subject, at a minute's notice, could never bring himself to pen these verses, and so the pages left for the record of the death of the favourites remain blank.

The wolf-hound came as a stray dog just after we settled in the cottage, and his master always declared he was a special gift from Providence, sent to make up for some of the trials of a literary life. While we were trying to find a suitable name for him, we spoke of him as the big dog, in contradistinction to our little ones; and he soon showed so clearly that he knew we were talking of him whenever we mentioned "the big dog," that we agreed to name him Big Dog. In time this was familiarised into Big 'un, and it was amusing to notice that some of our visitors seemed nervous at making such a lapse in grammar, and would address him as Big-one. He was an immense

BIRDS.

FROM Aristophanes to Tennyson birds have been the poet's favourites. Who wonders? There is affinity between poets and birds. Both are winged creatures, capricious in their conduct. Both have this special endowment-the faculty of enjoying life. For although your poet is sometimes apt to put some imaginary misery into Spenserian stanzas, he is really a gentleman with a fine capacity for rumpsteaks and port; even as the nightingale, whose song has in it a long, strange, melancholy wail, is rather a jovial bird than otherwise, and possesses an admirable appetite for worms. Aristophanes writes of the Kaтwpayâs, which Coleridge transfers to the publishers; Tennyson, in perhaps the most charming, certainly the most Horatian, poem he ever wrote, says :

"You'll have no scandal while you dine,

But honest talk and wholesome wine,

And only hear the magpie gossip,

Garrulous under a roof of pine."

Every bird that flies is the poet's friend; and it is quite worth while to regard poetic ornithology as a definite

science, and to study the habits of birds for a literary purpose. A great poet never touches bird or flower, or any other natural entity, without finding in it something new and delightful. Shakespeare has immortalised the robin redbreast as

He

Indeed, our red-waistcoated friend sings all the year through; he is the cheeriest little fellow in the world when the snow is on the ground; he accepts your crumbs with an air of independent thankfulness, wishing all the while for the time of bees and butterflies to arrive. is never tired and never terrified. Birds of prey will not touch him. We have seen a tame falcon perched on a garden roller pecking away at a piece of raw meat, and a robin below picking up the fragments. The hawk touched him not; if a sparrow had come near, he would have been killed on the instant.

Early summer is the time to see birds at their best. They have their young families about them, and are pleasantly parental. Not long ago we saw a bronzecoated starling on the lawn feeding four brown children with worms. "The raucous talk of the early starling' might be worth Mr. Darwin's study; it is nearer articulation than any inferior speech that we know. Many a spring morning have we lain awake listening to those birds with a feeling that we almost knew their language. It surely must have intelligible significance.

On the reaches of the upper Thames there are pretty ornithic studies at such a time. At Medmenham, for

BIRDS BY THE THAMES.

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instance, over whose abbey door a Chancellor of the Exchequer caused to be cut the legend Fay ce que voudras, you may see the swans leading out their young flotillas of cygnets, while the circling swallow flashes along the river, and the nightingales sing passionately through the summer afternoon. All at once a great bird, purple-grey when the sun touches him, rises into air: it is a heron, just off to look for his fish-supper, and fearless of hawks because he knows that all gamekeepers have an idiotic hatred to the falcon tribe. Hawks keep down vermin, and seldom kill any game that is not diseased; but you can no more persuade a keeper thereof than you can persuade a farmer to tolerate sparrows. Nothing is more disgusting than the way in which rare birds are shot down by any country lout who carries an unlicensed gun; if such destructive blockheads could be kept in order, we might in time make England a great aviary. Why should not the eagle come back to the Thames? One could forgive him even if he now and then killed a heron. Paroquets have taken to living among the London sparrows; if they would go on, their red and blue plumage would be an immense addition to our ordinary colours. However, to return to the Thames. A pair of stately swans float by, with nine cygnets around them; let anything frighten them, and the little birds on the instant scramble on their parents' backs, and are lost beneath their mighty depth of wing. Anger not the male swan just now; his fatherly position makes him braver than ever, and he will fly at a boatful of human beings. Beyond you may see a little squadron of moorfowl; throw a stone, they will all

VOL. II.

F