india-rubber weapons on the water-rats underneath, slew nearly every one of them. The few left had evidently learnt extreme caution from the misfortune of their friends, and no longer trusted themselves away from the water, into which they could slip at the movement of a shadow. Mr. Hay disliked to see the slouching fellows making tracks across his fields, every one of which he looked on with as much jealousy as if it had been a garden--a wild garden they were too, strewn sometimes with the white cotton of the plane tree, hung about with roses and sweet with mowing grass. Those who love fields and every briar in the hedge dislike to see them entered irreverently. I have just the same feeling myself even of fields and woods in which I have no personal interest; it jars upon me to see nature profaned. These fellows were a 'Black George' lot, in hamlet language. Nestor Hay knew everybody in the village round about, their fathers and grandfathers, their politics and religious opinions, and whether they were new folk or ancient inhabitants--an encyclopaedic knowledge not written, an Homeric memory. For I imagine in ancient days when books were scarce that was how men handed down the history of the chiefs of Troy. An Homeric memory for everything--superstitions, traditions, anecdotes; the only difficulty was that you could not command it. You could not turn to letter A or B and demand information direct about this or that; you must wait till it came up incidentally in conversation. In one of the villages there was a young men's club, and, among other advantages, when they were married they could have a cradle for nothing. A cottager had a child troubled with a slight infirmity; the doctor ordered the mother to prepare a stew of mice and give him the gravy. There happened to be some threshing going on, and one of the men caught her nine mice, which she skinned and cooked. She did not much like the task, but she did it, and the child never knew but that it was beef gravy. It cured him completely. This is the second time I have come across this curious use of mice. I had heard of it as a traditional resource among the country people, but in this case it seemed to have been ordered by a medical practitioner. Perhaps, after all, there may be something in the strange remedies and strange mixtures of remedies so often described in old books, and what we now deride may not have been without its value. If an empirical remedy will cure you, it is of more use than a scientific composition which ought to cure you but does not. How much depends on custom! The woman felt a repugnance to skinning the mice, yet they are the cleanest creatures, living on grain; she would have skinned a hare or rabbit without hesitation, and have cooked and eaten bacon, though the pig is not a cleanly feeder. It is a country remark that the pig's foot--often seen on the table--has as many bones as there are letters of the alphabet. The grapnel kept at every village