“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us. . . . For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen—” “The Times, ma’am—” “Thank you, Dixon. . . . The Queen’s birthday! We must drink her Majesty’s health in the old white port, Dixon. Home Rule—tut—tut—tut. All that madman Gladstone. My father would have thought the world was coming to an end, and I’m not at all sure that it isn’t. I must talk to Dr. Lipscomb—” Yet all the time in the tail of her eye she saw myriads of sparrows, and retiring to the study proclaimed in a pamphlet of which 36,000 copies were gratuitously distributed that the sparrow is a pest. “When he eats an insect,” she said to her sister Georgians, “which isn’t often, it’s one of the few insects that one wants to keep—one of the very few,” she added with a touch of acidity natural to one whose investigations have all tended to the discredit of the insect race. “But there’ll be some very unpleasant consequences to face,” she concluded—“Very unpleasant indeed.” Happily the port was now brought in, the servants assembled; and Miss Ormerod, rising to her feet, gave the toast “Her Blessed Majesty.” She was extremely loyal, and moreover she liked nothing better than a glass of her father’s old white port. She kept his pigtail, too, in a box. Such being her disposition it went hard with her to analyse the sparrow’s crop, for the sparrow she felt, symbolises something of the homely virtue of English domestic life, and to proclaim it stuffed with deceit was disloyal to much that she, and her fathers before her, held dear. Sure enough the clergy—the Rev. J. E. Walker—denounced her for her brutality; “God Save the Sparrow!” exclaimed the Animal’s Friend; and Miss Carrington, of the Humanitarian League, replied in a leaflet described by Miss Ormerod as “spirity, discourteous, and inaccurate.” “Well,” said Miss Ormerod to her sister, “it did me no harm before to be threatened to be shot at, also hanged in effigy, and other little attentions.” “Still it was very disagreeable, Eleanor—more disagreeable I believe, to me than to you,” said Georgiana. Soon Georgiana died. She had however finished the beautiful series of insect diagrams at which she worked every morning in the dining-room and they were presented to Edinburgh University. But Eleanor was never the same woman after that. Dear forest fly—flour moths—weevils—grouse and cheese flies—beetles—foreign correspondents—eel worms—ladybirds—wheat midges—resignation from the Royal Agricultural Society—gall mites—boot beetles—Announcement of honorary degree to be conferred—feelings of appreciation and anxiety—paper on wasps—last annual report warnings of serious illness—proposed pension—gradual loss of strength—Finally Death. That is life, so they say.