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WHITHER, midst falling dew,

While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue Thy solitary way?

Vainly the fowler's eye

Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,
As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,
Thy figure floats along.

Seekest thou the plashy brink

Of weedy lake, or marge1 of river wide,
Or where the rocking billows rise and sink
On the chafed ocean side?

1 marge, margin.

There is a Power whose care

Teaches thy way along that pathless coast
The desert 1 and illimitable air

Lone wandering, but not lost.

All day thy wings have fanned,

At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere ;
Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
Though the dark night is near.

And soon that toil shall end,

Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest,
And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend
Soon o'er thy sheltered nest.

Thou 'rt gone, the abyss of heaven

Hath swallowed up thy form; yet on my heart.
Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,
And shall not soon depart.

He who, from zone to zone,

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, In the long way that I must tread alone,

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1. IT is difficult to tell how Thomas Edward became a naturalist. He himself says he could never tell. Va

rious influences determine the direction of boys' likings and dislikings. Boys who live in the country are usually fond of birds and birdnesting; just as girls who live at home are fond of dolls and doll-keeping. But this boy had more than the ordinary tendency to like living things; he wished to live among them. He made pets of them, and desired to have them constantly about him.1

2. When only about four months old, he leaped from his mother's arms, in the vain endeavor to catch some flies buzzing in the window. She clutched him by his long clothes, and saved him from falling to the ground. When afterward asked about the origin of his love for natural history, he said, "I suppose it must have originated in the same internal impulse which prompted me to catch those flies in the window. This unseen something - this double being, or call it what you will — inherent in us all, whether used for good or evil, which stimulated the unconscious babe to get at, no doubt, the first living animals he had ever seen, at length grew in the man into an irresistible and unconquerable passion, and engendered in him an insatiable longing for, and earnest desire to be always among, such things. This is the only reason I can give for becoming a lover of nature. I know of none other.”

3. When the family removed to Aberdeen, young Edward was in his glory. Close at hand were the Inches, — the beautiful green Inches, covered with waving algæ. There,

1 Thomas Edward, the son of a poor weaver, was born at Gosport, Scotland, in 1814. As a boy, he was passionately fond of studying the habits of living creatures, a pursuit he has ever since kept up. Though leading the humble life of a journeyman shoemaker, he has made very important additions to science, and has now the high honor of being made a fellow of the Linnæan Society. An interesting life of Edward, from which this extract is made, has been written by Dr. Samuel Smiles.

too, grew the scurvy-grass, and the beautiful sea-daisy. Between the Inches were channels through which the tide flowed, with numerous pots or hollows. These were the places for bandies, eels, crabs, and worms.

4. Above the Inches, the town's manure was laid down. The heaps were remarkably prolific in beetles, rats, sparrows, and numerous kinds of flies. Then the Denburn yielded no end of horse-leeches, tadpoles, frogs, and other creatures that abound in fresh or muddy water. The boy used daily to play at these places, and brought home with him his "venomous beasts," as the neighbors called them. At first they consisted, for the most part, of tadpoles, beetles, snails, frogs, sticklebacks, and small green crabs; but, as he grew older, he brought home horse-leeches, newts, young rats, a nest of young rats was a glorious prize,field-mice and house-mice, hedgehogs, moles, birds, and bird's-nests of various kinds.

5. The fishes and birds were easily kept; but as there was no secure place for the puddocks, horse-leeches, rats, and such like, they usually made their escape into the adjoining houses, where they were by no means welcome guests. The neighbors complained of the venomous creatures which the young naturalist was continually bringing home. The horse-leeches crawled up their legs and stuck to them, fetching blood; the puddocks and newts roamed about the floors; and the beetles, moles, and rats sought for holes wherever they could find them.

6. The boy was expostulated with. His mother threw out all his horse-leeches, crabs, birds, and bird's-nests; and he was strictly forbidden to bring such things into the house again. But it was of no use. The next time that he went out to play he brought home as many of his

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'beasts as before. He was then threatened with corporal punishment; but that very night he brought in a nest of young rats. He was then flogged; but it did him no good. The disease, if it might be so called, was so firmly rooted in him as to be entirely beyond the power of outward appliances. And so it was found in the end.

7. As he could not be kept at home, but was always running after his "beasts," his father at last determined to take his clothes from him altogether; so, one morning when he went to work, he carried them with him. When the boy got up, and found that he had nothing to wear, he was in a state of great dismay. His mother, having pinned a bit of an old petticoat round his neck, said to him, “I am sure you'll be a prisoner this day." But no! His mother went down-stairs for milk, leaving him in the house. He had tied a string round his middle, to render himself a little more fit for moving about. He followed his mother downstairs, and hid himself at the back of the entry door; and as soon as she had passed in, Tom bolted out, ran down the street, and immediately was at his old employment of hunting for crabs, horse-leeches, puddocks, and sticklebacks.

8. Edward was between four and five years old when he went to school. He was sent there principally that he might be kept out of harm's way. He did not go willingly; for he was of a roving, wandering disposition, and did not like to be shut up anywhere. He wanted to be free to roam about the Inches, up the Denburn, and along the path to Rubislaw, birdnesting.

9. The first school to which he was sent was a dame's school. It was kept by an old woman called Bell Hill. It was for the most part a girls' school, but Bell consented

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