It was Monday when our visit commenced, so that we were no longer strangers in the house by the following Sunday. But we were not prepared for the contrast between the Sundays at Davenant Hall with those at Netherby. At our own home, grave as the day was, there was always a quiet festival air about it. The hall was fresh swept, and strewn with clean sand. My Father and my Aunts, the maids and men, had on their holiday dresses. That morning at prayers we always had a psalm, and the mere thrill of my voice against my Father's rich deep tones was a pleasure to me. Then after breakfast Roger and I had a walk in the fields with him, and he made us hear, and see a hundred things in the ways of birds and beasts and insects that we should never have known without him. One day it was the little brown and white harvest-mouse, which, by cautiously approaching it, we saw climbing by the help of its tail and claws to its little round nest woven of grass suspended from a corn-stalk. Another day it was a squirrel, with its summer house hung to the branch of a tree with its nursery of little squirrels; and its warm winter house, lined with hay, in the fork of an old trunk; or a colony of ants roofing their dwellings in the wood with dry leaves and twigs. Or he would turn it into a parable and show us how every creature has its enemies, and must live on the defensive or not live at all. Or he would watch with us the butterfly struggling from the chrysalis, or the dragon-fly soaring from its first life in the reedy creeks of the Mere to the new life of freedom in the sunshine. Or he would point out to us how the field-spider had anticipated military science; how she threw up her bulwarks and strengthened every weak point by her fairy buttresses, and kept up the communication between the citadel and the remotest outwork. Or he would teach us to distinguish the various songs of the birds, the throstles, the chaffinches, the blackbirds, or the nightingales. God, he said, had filled the woods with throngs of sacred carollers, and melodious troubadours, and merry minstrels; some with one sweet monotonous cadence, one bell-like note, one happy little "peep" or chirp, and no more, and others overflowing with a passion of intricate and endlessly varied song; and it was a churlish return for such a concert not to give heed enough to learn one song from another. Or, together, we would watch the rooks in the great elm grove behind the house, how strict their laws of property were, the old birds claiming the same nest every year, and the young ones having to construct new ones. Or he would tell us of the different forms of government among the various creatures; how the bees had an hereditary monarchy, yet owned no aristocracy but that of labour, killing their drones before winter, that if any would not work neither should he eat; and how the rooks held parliaments. Everywhere he made us see, wonderfully blended and