approach, vanishing through the surrounding wall of tall meadow-grass in a twinkling, or they would cluck and crane their necks to look at me, and then go on feeding--all except the cock-bird, who invariably fled, and from his hiding-place would keep on making nervous remarks to his wife, who kept as regularly reassuring him with little comfortable clucks that all was right. A little scattered chicken-food brought them very soon through the gate into the garden, and from the garden on to the terrace, where they came at last to feed as regularly and happily as ordinary pigeons. But when September came, and the guns were busy in the farmers' fields that lay outside their garden-asylum, the covey gradually dwindled away till, out of the nine, only four survived the season. The pheasants, too, were free of the grounds, and they were always in evidence. The carnations had all to be fenced in wherever growing, for the pheasants would not leave them alone, and they were very fond, too, of parading along the wall, and pecking off all the jessamine buds and tips they could reach; but with jessamine we could afford to be liberal, and the birds were allowed to eat all they could. Not all that they would though. For one day, while sitting in a greenhouse, I saw an old cock, the most absurdly vain old bird imaginable, fall off the wall. He tried to reach a tuft of jessamine that was exactly impossible, and after many half tumbles and recoveries of balance with much wing-flapping, he at last made one more desperate effort, just a little more desperate than before, and just too much for his balance, for down he came with a kind of somersault into the garden. And to see him on the ground, how he shook himself and looked round; how affronted he was, and how pompous! If he walked stiffly before, he was now positively on wires. If haughty in demeanour at all times, he was now as superciliously superb as Tamburlane. He moved, like Shakespeare's peacock, with "a stride and a stand," the very personification of magnificence embarrassed. And in obedience to his call the two hens, who had been staring from the top of the wall, astonished at the sudden falling-off in stateliness of their dandified emperor, flew down, and he led them off, loftily explaining as he went his reasons for his new method of getting down from a wall, and the advantages that the intelligent derived from such originalities of procedure. [Illustration: "_Firm on her perch_ _Her ancient and accustom'd seat, she sits_ _With wing-couched head._" GRAHAME. ] "_When first the vales the Bittern fills_ _Or the first Woodcock roams the moonlit hills._" WORDSWORTH. "_Beside the Redbreast's note, one other strain,_ _One summer strain, in wintry days is heard--_ _Amid the leafless thorns the merry Wren_ _Pipes her perennial lay._" BLOOMFIELD.