crawled with a moan-like whine to our brother's feet, and expired. Reader, young, bright, and beautiful though thou be--remember all flesh is dust! This is an episode--a tale, in itself complete, yet growing out of, and appertaining to, the main plot of Epic or Article. You will recollect we were speaking of ducks, teals, and widgeons; and we come now to the next clause of the verse--wild geese and swans. Some people's geese are all swans; but so far from that being the case with ours--sad and sorry are we to say it--now all our swans are geese. But in our buoyant boyhood, all God's creatures were to our eyes just as God made them; and there was ever--especially birds--a tinge of beauty over them all. What an inconceivable difference--distance--to the imagination, between the nature of a tame and a wild goose! Aloft in heaven, themselves in night invisible, the gabble of a cloud of wild geese is sublime. Whence comes it--whither goes it--for what end, and by what power impelled? Reason sees not into the darkness of instinct--and therefore the awestruck heart of the night-wandering boy beats to hear the league-long gabble that probably has winged its wedge-like way from the lakes, and marshes, and dreary morasses of Siberia, from Lapland, or Iceland, or the unfrequented and unknown northern regions of America--regions set apart, quoth Bewick we believe, for summer residences and breeding-places, and where they are amply provided with a variety of food, a large portion of which must consist of the larvæ of gnats, and myriads of insects, there fostered by the unsetting sun! Now they are gabbling good Gaelic over a Highland night-moor. Perhaps in another hour the descending cloud will be covering the wide waters at the head of the wild Loch Maree--or, silent and asleep, the whole host be riding at anchor around Lomond's Isles!