We Americans, indeed, are peculiarly placed in this respect. As a people, we are still, in some sense, half aliens to the country Providence has given us; there is much ignorance among us regarding the creatures which held the land as their own long before our forefathers trod the soil, and many of which are still moving about us, living accessories of our existence, at the present hour. On the other hand, again, English reading has made us very familiar with the names, at least, of those races which people the old world. From the nursery epic, relating the melancholy fate of “Cock Robin,” and the numerous feathered _dramatis personæ_ figuring in its verses; from the tragical histories of “Little Red Riding Hood,” and the “Babes in the Woods;” from the winged and four-footed company of Gay and Lafontaine, from these associates of our childhood to the larks and nightingales of Shakspeare and Milton, we all, as we move from the nursery to the library, gather notions more or less definite. We fancy that we know all these creatures by sight; and yet neither “Cock Robin,” nor his murderer the Sparrow, nor his parson the Rook, is to be found this side the salt sea; the cunning Wolf whose hypocritical personation of the old grandame, so wrung our little hearts once upon a time, is not the wolf which howled only a few years since in the forests our fathers felled; the wily Fox of Lafontaine, “Certain renard Gascon, D’autres disent Normand,” is not the fox of Yankeeland—albeit we have our foxes too! Neither the Marten, “The temple-loving martlet, does approve By his lov’d mansioning that the heavens breath Smells wooingly here. * * * where they Most breed, and haunt, I have observed the air Is delicate;” nor the nightingale who “Sings darkling, and in the shadiest covert hid, Tunes her nocturnal notes;” nor the lark “The herald of the morn,” flies within three thousand miles of our own haunts. Thus it is that knowing so little of the creatures in whose midst we live, and mentally familiar by our daily reading with the tribes of another hemisphere, the forms of one continent and the names and characters of another, are strangely blended in most American minds. And in this dream-like phantasmagoria, where fancy and reality are often so widely at variance, in which the objects we see, and those we read of are wholly different, and where bird and beast undergo metamorphoses so strange, most of us are content to pass through life.