All through Alsace, wherever ponds or streams exist, may be seen daily vast flocks of geese during the summer and autumn, screaming, splashing, and diving in the water. The landscape is white with them, and the plain resounds with their clamour. Each flock, which often numbers a thousand, has its goose-herd and goose-dog. At dawn the herder sounds his reveille, beginning to assemble his charges from the most remote part of the village or hamlet. These take their place in the procession of their own accord, until the ranks are complete, and they eagerly wend their way to the coveted goal. Here they remain until evening, when, at a summons from the herder, the return journey is accomplished, each individual flock leaving the phalanx on arriving near its home. Less idyllic is the life of the town goose, when large ponds and succulent herbage are not readily accessible, the birds being confined in yards where, in place of a daily round of bathing and gossiping, they are compelled to watch the flight of the storks overhead and mark the monotonous passing of the hours as they are tolled from the Rathhaus tower. Nearly every other house or yard of the poorer classes has its geese, the young fowls alone being utilised for their livers. In late October or early November the fattening begins, a process lasting usually from two to three weeks, the prized livers--the true "golden egg" of the bird of St. Michael--then weighing from two to three pounds. [Illustration: THE BIRD OF ST. MICHAEL From the etching by Birket-Foster, R.A.] The humanitarian will protest against the cruelty of gorging the fowl to repletion, depriving it of drink, and imprisoning it in close cages to gratify the voracity of man. Yet it must be admitted that hitherto everything possible to the maintenance of the health and pleasure of the subject has been lavishly supplied, and that a brief span at most would elapse ere time must claim its victim. The fox and the goose have always been closely associated, and what applies to one may well apply to the other. "Certainly," reasons Bulwer, "in the chase itself all my sympathies are on the side of the fox. But if all individuals are to give way to the happiness of the greatest number, we must set off against the painful fate of the fox the pleasurable sensation in the breasts of numbers which his fate has the honourable privilege to excite." Without the inconveniences that the Strassburg goose is compelled to undergo in behalf of the metamorphosis of its liver, the list of _plats de prédilection_ were shorn of one of its greatest attractions, and a city now of world-wide fame must soon drag out a monotonous existence and be forgotten unless by the student of architecture--a fact duly set forth in the following stanza: "Strasbourg tire vanité De ses pâtés de foie; Cette superbe cité Ne doit sa prospérité Qu'aux oies!"