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THEO. WOLFE.

COOKHAM DEAN.

For a long time "the Dean" had had a certain familiarity for us. We heard it continually spoken of among our artist friends, and had even come to recognize many of its picturesque features as we came across them in our usual studio-haunts and in the exhibitions. We seemed to know those green, billowy swells at sight, as well as the thatched and tiled roofs and old-fashioned gardens, the swinging barred gates and stagnant, goose-tormented pools,--even the coarse-limbed rustics in weather-beaten "store-clothes," picturesque only in mellow fadedness.

We knew all this; yet, when we set eyes and feet upon Cookham Dean for the first time, behold, the half had not been told us! We had directed many a letter to Cookham Dean, and knew them to have been duly delivered by a bucolic postman on a tricycle. But a hundred canvases, and almost as many tongues, had failed to tell us of the sunny slopes and shadowy glades, the sylvan lanes and ribbon-like roads, the old stone inn with open porch and sign swinging from lofty post set across the way, as Italian campanile stand away from their churches, all coming under the name of "Cookham Dean," although that "Dean," properly speaking, is only their geographical and artistic centre.

From certain points of the "Dean" the distances are dreamy and wide, with high horizon-lines touching wooded hills and shutting the Thames into a middle distance toward which a hundred little hills either descend abruptly or decline gently upon broad green meadows. Nature here smiles, not with pure pagan blitheness, but with a tenderer grace, as of a soul grown human and fraught with countless memories of man's smiles and tears, his hard, bitter labor, his sins, sorrows, and longings. But it is very tender, and not even the wildest storm-effects raise the landscape to any expression of tragic grandeur, but only suede its fair hues and soft outlines to the wan pathos peculiar to English moorlands.

To the usual artistic circle of Ye Hutte is often added a not uncongenial element from the outside world, sometimes even from within the borders of Philistia. Story-tellers, moved by the subtile magnetism of the artistic creative faculty, whether of brush, chisel, or pen, come up sometimes from London, bringing with them an atmosphere of publishers' offices, of romance in high and low life, of professional gossip and criticism. Often a stalwart bicyclist rolls up from the capital, bringing with him such a breeze from the world of newspapers, theatres, and crack restaurants that Ye Hutte straightway determines to order some weekly journal, waxes ardent for flesh-pots other than of Cookham, and resolves upon having a Lyceum twice a week when the Dean shall be swept by the blasts and St. John's Wood studios swallow us up for the winter.

The Dean is little favored of the ordinary fashionable visitor, for whom artistic accommodations are quite too scantily luxurious. Now and then, for the sake of the river, a rustic cot is taken for a few weeks by a party of boating-people. Then the quaint, old-fashioned gardens blossom with a sudden luxuriance of striped tents and flaming umbrellas, while bright women in many-hued boating-costumes flit among cabbages and onions like curious tropical birds and butterflies. As a rule, however, the Dean is abandoned to its usual rustic population and to artists, numbers of the latter remaining all winter in the haunts whence the majority of their kind have flown.

That same Bohemian, after years of the Latin Quarter and Mont de Pi?t?, found himself one summer on the Dean. One evening at the porch of Ye Hutte he met a lively group of painters and paintresses, just returned from corn-field and meadow.

"Yes," he said, with colossal, adamantine impudence, "I've just got it back from a two-years' visit to 'my uncle'."

Only a few evenings later the same party met again in the same spot.

A mammoth blush submerged the luckless Bohemian. For Dean propriety was already becoming engrafted upon Continental habit, and he crimsoned at having to confess what once he would have proclaimed upon the house-top,--that his watch was again with his "uncle."

Probably nine-tenths of the Continental artists who are not entirely beyond the dread of yet eating "mad cow" travel third-class. But Dean artists, however they may travel when out of England, generally slip quietly away from the sight of their acquaintances when their tickets are other than at least second. Our Bohemian was once presented with a second-class ticket to London. As he scrambled in upon the unwonted luxury of cushioned seats, he saw familiar faces blushing furiously.

"The first time we ever travelled second-class in our lives," murmured Materfamilias.

"I too," responded the cheeky Bohemian.

Alas! this was eloquence lost; for, at that very dinner, conversation chancing to turn upon the subtile malignity of Fanny Matilda's smiles, Fanny Matilda being there present, in less time than it takes to tell it twenty crayon smiles writhed and wriggled upon the spick-span cloth.

Aloofly though the Deanite lives, he is not altogether an unsocial being. Neither are his domestic habits always as invisible to the finite eye as he perhaps intends them to be. Tent-life has scant privacy, and the circumscribed accommodation of the Dean leads to frequent "slopping over" into cloth annexes.

For the very best of reasons, we were not 'cyclists, although in a country set with 'cycles as the fields with flowers or the sky with stars.

For reasons equally good, we were not boatists, although the watery way from Oxford to the sea flowed so near our door, and our village was one of the gayest head-quarters not only of the fresh-water navy, whose arms are flashing oars and whose oaths are of the universities, but equally that of regiments of painters, whose arms are sketching-umbrellas and easels and who swear not at all,--or at least not to feminine hearing.

Our lodgings were among the artists in the region farther back from the river than that monopolized by the boating-people. We were back among the sunny slopes and smiling meadows, the red-tiled farm-houses and dusky lanes, of the still primitive natives of the region, while the navy covered the shining river by day and overran the river-side hostelries by night.

But where, tell me where, are not artists in England? And where, tell me where, do artists gather in squads that Ethel Cottages do not spring up like the tents of an army with banners? For even painters must eat and be lodged, the aboriginal habitations are not of elastic capacity, the inns are of feeble digestion, and the third summer of an artistic invasion is sure to find "Ethels" and "Mabels" in red brick and stunning whitewash, and, like our row of laborers' cottages, cursed by artists, but inhabited by them.

What would we not have given for an invitation to pass a time, as Miss Muloch was, in one of those Thames monsters concerning which she wrote her fascinating pages, "A Week in a House-Boat"! We could scarce catch a glimpse of the river upon our tramps--and it was our constant silvery accompaniment, as the treble to a part-song--without coming across these ungraceful, unwieldy creatures, seeming like bloated denizens of depths below come to bask upon the surface. Hundreds of them dot the river between Teddington and Oxford: once we counted ten between Ethel and the wooded island whither we rowed every Sunday to dine from ponderous hampers upon a huge tree-stump. Many of them are owned and occupied by artists, who have them towed by horses up and down the river every week or two, or moor them for months in one place while painting river-scenery. Some are inhabited by maniacal fishermen, who sit day after day all day long at the end of poles protruding from front or back doors or bedroom windows. Some are inhabited by Londoners in whom primeval instincts for air, space, sunshine, and liberty break out every summer from under the thick crust of modern habits and conventions and cause them to breathe, as we did, not angelical aspirations, but "I want to be a gypsy."

Americans personally unacquainted with England can form little idea of the extent to which physical culture is carried here, and the universal summer madness for athletic sports and out-of-door amusements. The equable climate, never too hot, never too cold, for river-pull or cricket, is Albion's advantage in this respect over almost all the rest of the world, and particularly over our fervid and freezing clime. Even although this is pious England, where the gin-shops cannot open after the noon of Sunday until the bells ring for the evening service and "Pub" and church spring open and alight simultaneously, even in pious England Sunday is the day of all the week on which the river takes on its merriest aspect, and from the multitudes of familiar faces and frequency of friendly greetings reminds one of Regent Street and the Parks. All prosperous and proper London--the amusement is too costly for 'Arry--seems to float itself upon Thames water that day, coming up forty land-miles from the metropolis to do so. Boats are furiously in demand, every picnic nook is pre-empted from earliest morning, the river-side tea-gardens are thronged, the inns are depleted of men and women in yachting-costumes, and the locks are jammed as full as they can be of highly-draped boats, gayly-dressed women, and circus-costumed men, the whole scene gayer, brighter, more fantastic than any Venetian carnival since the days of the most sumptuous of the Adriatic doges.

One or two real Venetian gondolas are kept at that river-reach where we spent our summer. The owner of the principal one is an English nobleman who lived long in Italy and whose twelve daughters were born there. It is a sight to see those twelve beautiful sisters, from six years of age to twenty-four, poled down the river to church every Sunday morning by a swarthy and veritable Venetian gondolier. Whether or not that hearse-like craft has sacred associations in the minds of the twelve maidens all in a row, or whether its grimness and want of swiftness seem out of place amid the carnival brilliancy of Sunday afternoon, it is certain that it is never used except for church-going, and the maidens appear later in the day each in her own swift little canoe, or two or three sisters together in a larger one, darting to and fro, hither and yon, with almost incredible swiftness, almost more like winged thoughts than like even swallows on the wing. The gabled and ivy-wreathed Elizabethan manor-house which is the summer home of the maidens stands but a few rods from the river's bank. Here, amidst decorous shrubbery, upon smooth shaven and rolled turf, where marble vases overflow with gorgeous flowers, sit Pater and Mater among their dozens of guests. Some of the gentlemen are in correct morning dress, some in boating-costumes, and some in that last stage of unclothedness or first of clothedness which is the English bathing-dress. In their striped tights on land these last look exactly like saw-dust and rope ring clowns, but when they dive into the water from that well-bred lawn and dart in wild pursuit of the maidens, who beat them off with oars from climbing into the canoes, amid shouts of aquatic and terrestrial laughter, one would almost swear they were neither the clowns they looked a moment ago, nor yet the English gentlemen they really are, but fantastic mermen bent upon carrying earth-brides back with them into their cool native depths beneath the bright water.

That is what it looks like. But a single glimpse into those cool dappled depths, where the sunny water is shoal enough to show bottom, reveals, alas! how little mermaiden and romantic those depths are. For London does not disport itself every Sunday on the Thames without leaving ample traces of that disporting. We see those traces gleaming and glooming there,--empty beer- and wine-bottles, devitalized sardine-boxes, osseous remains of fish, flesh, and fowl, scooped cheese-rinds, egg-shells, the buttons of defrauded raiment, and the parted rims of much-snatched-at and vigorously-squabbled-for straw hats.

Gliding up and down the river, one would suppose all London had taken to boats. But we as trampists came to other conclusions as we pegged along the white Berkshire highways, smooth and even as parquetted floors, day after day. There the bicycle holds its own, and more too, being largely adopted not only by genuine 'cyclists, but by others as well whose only interest is to cover the ground as quickly as possible,--amateur photographers lashed all over with apparatus, artists shapelessly ditto, and pastoral postmen square-backed with letter-pouches. Women tricyclists are only less numerous, and the dignity and modesty must be crude indeed that find objections to this manner of feminine peregrination. The costume is simple and plain,--close-fitting upper garments, without fuss of furbelow, and plain close skirts, met at the ankles by high buttoned boots. A lady's seat upon a tricycle is far less conspicuous than upon a horse, her bodily motion is less, and the movement of her feet scarcely more than is necessary to run a sewing-machine. She sits at her ease in a perfectly lady-like manner, and flies over the ground like a courser of the desert, if she pleases, or rolls quietly and smoothly along, chatting easily with the pedestrians who amble at her side.

Lady tricyclists attract no attention whatever in Oxford Street. Imagine one flying down Broadway!

The next day we subscribed to the "News," and walked nine miles as the bee flies from the front door of Ethel even unto the ruins of Medmenham. And we vowed by all our plaster gods and painted goddesses that another summer we would tramp no more. We would 'cycle.

A mile away from Ethel is the village proper of Cookham. It is a sleepy town, save in the boating-season; and whoever enters the post-office in any season finds it empty and inhospitable. Raps upon a tightly-closed inner door call a woman attendant from rattling sewing or noisy gossip of the invisible penetralia; and as soon as the business is done the inhospitable door swings shut again in the stranger's face.

Cookham houses are quaint, often timbered, frequently ivy-grown from basement to roof. One imagines them assuming a half-sullen air at this yearly breaking of their dreamy repose by incursions of parti-colored hordes for whom life seems to hold but two supreme objects,--boats and pictures.

The most picturesque feature of the place is the old church, set amid tombs whose mossy and time-gnawed cherubs have exchanged grins for two hundred years and more. The old flint tower is grave and grim, but softened by a wonderful centuries old ivy in a veil of living green. A pathetic interest to artists hallows the venerable church-yard. Here sleeps Frederick Walker, a genius cut off before his meridian, and resting now amid his kindred in a lowly grave, over which the Thames waters surge every spring, leaving the grave all the rest of the year the sadder for its cold soddenness and for the humid mildew and decay eating already into the headstone, as yet but twelve years old. In the church itself is Thorneycroft's mural tablet to the dead artist, a portrait head of him who was born almost within the old church's shadow, and whose pencil dealt always so lovingly with the poetic aspects of his native region.

MARGARET BERTHA WRIGHT.

BIRDS OF A TEXAN WINTER.

Where do all the birds, myriads in number and scores in species, go when they leave the North in the winter? A small minority lags, not superfluous, for we are delighted to have them, but in a subdued, pinched, and hand-to-mouth mode of existence in marked contrast to their summer life and perceptibly marring the pleasure of their society. They flock around our homes and assume a mendicant air that is a little depressing. Unlike the featherless tramps, they pay very well for their dole; but we should prefer them, as we do our other friends, to be independent, and that although we know they are but winter friends and will coolly turn their backs upon us as soon as the weather permits. The spryest and least dependent of them all, the snow-bird, who sports perpetual full dress, jerks at us his expressive tail and is off at the first thaw, black coat, white vest, and all. No tropics or sub-tropics for him. He can stand our climate and our company with a certain condescending tolerance so long as we keep the temperature not too much above zero, but grows contemptuous when Fahrenheit grows effeminate and forty. Nothing for it then but to cool off his thin and unprotected legs and toes in the snows of Canada. "The white North hath his" heart. Our winter is his summer. There is nothing in his anatomy to explain this idiosyncrasy. His physical construction closely resembles that of his insessorial brethren, most of whom go when he comes. He has no discoverable provision against cold. Adaptation to environment does not seem to cover his case. It does not cover his legs. They remain unfeathered. We shudder to see his translucent little tarsi on top of the snow, which he obviously prefers as a stand-point to bare spots where the snow has been blown away. Compared with the ptarmigan and the snowy owl, or even the ruffed grouse, all so well blanketed, he suggests a survival of the unfittest.

The movements of this tough little anti-Darwinian are overlapped by the bluebird and the robin,--our robin, best entitled to the name, inasmuch as it is accorded him by fifty-odd millions against thirty millions who give it to the redbreast,--who are usually with him long before he gets away. They never move very far southward, but watch the cantonments of Frost, ready to advance the moment his outposts are drawn in and signs appear of evacuation. Their climate, indeed, is determined in winter rather by altitude than by latitude. The low swamps and pineries that skirt tide-water in the Middle States furnish them a retreat. Thence they scatter themselves over the tertiary plain as it widens southward beneath the granite bench that divides all the great rivers south of the Hudson into an upper and a lower reach. Detachments of them extend their tour to the Gulf. Readers of "A Subaltern on the Campaign of New Orleans in 1814-15" will recall his mention of the assemblage of robins hopping over the Chalmette sward that were the first living inhabitants to welcome the weary invaders on emerging from the palmetto marshes. They can hardly be said to reach the particular region of which we propose to speak, both species, the bluebird especially, being almost strangers to it.

Other species, the cardinal grosbeak among them, may be said to stop, as it were, just out of hearing, the echo of their song slumbering in the thin, keen air, ready to swell again into unmistakable reality. Between these stubborn fugitives and those who follow the butterflies to the tropics there is a wide variety in the extent of travel in which our winged compatriots indulge.

Quadrupeds, whose movements are less speedy and more limited, have to adapt themselves to the Northern winter as best they may. Hard and long training has made them less the creatures of climate than their feathered associates, who might themselves in many cases have learned perforce to stay where they were reared but for possessing the light and agile wings which woo them to wander. We may fancy Bruin, with his passion for sweet mast and luscious fruits, eying with envy the martin and the wild fowl as they sweep over his head to the teeming Southland, and wondering, as he huddles shivering into his snowy lair, why Nature should be so partial in her gifts. The call of the trumpeting swan, the bugler crane, and the Canada goose falls idly upon his ear. To their breezy challenge, "A new home,--who'll follow?" he cannot respond.

Steam, then, soon carries us to the resort of the lost truants, who have travelled with the lines of longitude by guides and tracks over that invisible road as unerring as those of the railway. We shall find them in close companionship with friends unknown in our latitude, whose abiding-places are at the South, as those left behind are fixed dwellers at the North.

From the window at which I sit on this morning late in January and this parallel of thirty degrees,--window open, as well as the door, for no norther is on duty to-day,--I see flocks of our familiar redwings, cowbirds, and blackbirds, all mingled together as though the hard and fast lines of species had been obliterated and made as meaningless as the concededly evanescent shades of variety, trooping busily over the lawn and blackening the leafless China-trees. But they have a crony never seen by us. This is the crow-blackbird of the South, or jackdaw as it is wrongly called, otherwise known as the boat-tailed grackle, from his over-allowance of rudder that pulls him side-wise and ruins his dead-reckoning when a wind is on. His wife is a sober-looking lady in a suit of steel-gray, and the pair are quite conspicuous among their winter guests. The latter are far less shy than we are accustomed to find them, a majority being young in their first season and with little or no experience of human guile. No one cares to shoot them, in the abundance of larger game, and the absence of stones from the fat prairie-soil places them out of danger from the small boy. Their only foe is the hawk, who levies blackmail on them as coolly and regularly as any other plumed cateran. Partly, perhaps, by reason of this outside pressure, they are cheek by jowl with the poultry,--the cow-bunting, which is the pet prey of the hawk, following them into the back porch and insisting sometimes on breakfasting with Tray,--or rather with Legion, for that is the name of the Texas dog. In this familiarity they are approached, though not equalled, by that more home-staying bird the meadow-lark, who is here a dweller of the lawn and garden and adds his mellow whistle to the orchestra of the mocking-bird. This so-called lark is classed by most naturalists among the starlings, as are two of the blackbirds, which two he resembles in some of his habits, but not in migrating, being about as much of a continental as any other biped American. Nor is he like his cousins in changes of dress. Out of a dozen of the latter that may be brought down at a shot, you will scarcely find three exactly alike. They moult at the South, and the young pass gradually into adult plumage. The male redwing, up to his first autumn, is hardly distinguishable in dress from his mother. Here he dons his epaulettes, beginning with the threadbare worsted yellow of the private, and rising in grade to the rich scarlet and gold of the officer fully commissioned to flame upon the marsh and carry havoc among its humblest inhabitants.

A still more diffused, perhaps, if less productive, source of life exists in another burrower and mound-builder, the crawfish. Unlike the ant, which likes to drain, he is an advocate of irrigation. In this art he can give our well-diggers odds in the game. His genius for striking water is wonderful. On the dryest parts of the prairie, miles from any permanent stream, his ejections of mud may be found. Shallow or deep, his borings always reach water. He is always at home, but less accessible to callers than the ant. To the smaller birds he is forbidden fruit. In wet weather, when his vestibule is shallow, the sand-hill crane may burglarize him, or even get a snap judgment on him at the front door. The bill of the great curlew cannot be sent in so effectively, not being so rightly drawn; but that bird, more common in the season than anywhere else away from the coast, finds plenty of other food. He is not here in the winter. His place just now is filled by the jacksnipe, which flutters up from every boggy place and comes to bag in a condition anything but suggestive of short commons. The snipe's terrestrial surface lies two and a half inches beneath ours. At that distance he strikes hard pan; but it is margin enough for his operations, and he is not often caught among the shorts. Gourmands assure us that he lives "by suction," and that there is consequently no harm in eating his trail. There is comfort in this creed, whatever may be our private belief in the substantiality of what the bird absorbs; and we cheerfully eat, after the suggestion of Paul, "asking no questions," the while tacitly assuring ourselves, like old Fuller with the strawberry, that a better bird might doubtless have been made, but as certainly never was. For game flavor not even the partridge , also exceptionally abundant here, is his superior.

The most frequent vedette of these miniature lakes is the heron,--usually the blue, sometimes the larger white, the latter a most beautiful bird. Yet neither is common. Still rarer in such situations is the bittern, the Timon of birds, the rushes being seldom high enough to afford him the strict concealment he likes. The mallard has to be his own sentinel, as a rule. He does not depend on these ponds for food, and, like other wild creatures, he reserves his chief vigilance for feeding-time. They are places of repose, at mid-day and at night, for the ducks of this and two or three other species, notably the blue- and green-winged teal, which at other times haunt the clumps of oak and pecan that skirt the sparse streams and their summer-dry affluents, where nuts and acorns in great variety, those of the live-oak being very sweet, supply unfailing winter provision. The thickets of ilex that shade off these wooded reaches into the treeless prairie are the resort of many partridges. You are led back into the open ground by another game-bird, the pinnated grouse, the widest ranger of its genus, but at the North disappearing only less rapidly than the buffalo. As yet his most destructive foe in this region is perhaps the hawk, although he is raided from the timber by the opossum, raccoon, and three species of cat, while on the open his nest has marked attractions for the skunk and probably the coyote. He has survived these dumb discouragers so long, and the heat at his proper season is so trying to his human foe, that he may long find a refuge here and proudly lead forth his young Texans for scores of Augusts. He and his family will often quietly walk off while the panting pointer seeks the shade of the wagon and the gunner cools off under the heavy felt sombrero that is here found to be the best headgear for summer. A very moderate game-law, well executed, would sustain this fine bird indefinitely in the struggle for existence. But law of any kind seems a foreign idea on these sea-like primeval plains. It is like thinking of a parliament in the Pleiocene, or of a court-house on the Grand Banks.

Any transcendentalist who wishes to furbish up his philosophic furniture will find this a good workshop for the purpose. There is ample room for any school, positive or negative,--plenty of cloud-land for all conceits. Kant could have picked up pure reason among the crowds of simply reasoning creatures who have possessed the scene since long before the brain of man was created. Covies of immemorial Thoreaus bivouac under those hazy woods, and pre-glacial Emersons are circling overhead. The problem of successfully living they have all solved. What more have any of us done? The greatest good of the greatest number they unpresumingly display as a practically triumphant principle; and the greatest number is not by any means with them, any more than with us, number one. Had it been, they would all have been extinct long ago. Nature may be "red with tooth and claw," but not suicidally so. It is to quite a peaceable, if not wholly loving, world that she invites us. And just here we can see so much of it; we can study it so broadly and so freely. Concord and Walden dwindle into the microscopic. It was under precisely such a sun as this, in a warm, dry atmosphere, on a nearly treeless soil, that the Stagyrite did all the thinking of sixty generations. Could he have done it in an overcoat and muffler, with a chronic catarrh?

Of the feathered spectators of the scene we have episodically glanced at, the most interested were those constant supervisors, the vultures. Of these there are three species, one of which--the Mexican vulture--is but an occasional visitor. The other two--the black vulture and the turkey-buzzard--are monopolists in their peculiar line. They constitute here, as generally throughout the warmer parts of the continent and its islands, the recognized sanitary police. No law protects them, but they do not need it. They are too useful not to command that popular sympathy which is the higher law. The flocks and herds upon a thousand plains are theirs. Every norther that freezes and every drought that starves some of the wandering cattle and sheep brings to them provision. The railroads also, not less than the winds of heaven, are their friends, the fatal cow-catcher being an ever-busy caterer. The buzzards are, of course, under such circumstances, warm advocates of internal improvement and welcome the opening of every new railway. Their ardor in this respect, however, has of late years been damped by the building of wire fences along the track, an interference with vested rights and an assault upon the hoary claims of infant industries against which in their solemn assemblies they doubtless often condole with each other. Unfortunately for their cause, they cannot lobby.

Somehow, there seems to be always a wag or clown among each group of animals,--some one species in which the amusing or the grotesque is prominent. Among these clownish fellows I should class the black vulture, or john-crow. He is not a crow at all, but gets that name probably because so historic a tribe as Corvus must have some representative, and the real crow, so common at the North, is one of the few birds that are not much seen in this quarter. John unites in his ways at once fuss and business. He alternates oddly between bustle and gravity. Seated stately and motionless for hours on a leafless tree, he will suddenly, as if struck by a new idea, start off on a tour that might have been dictated by telegram. He does not sail and circle like his friend and comrade, never being distracted by soaring pretensions, but goes straight to his object. His flight is a regular succession of short flaps, with quiescent intervals between the series. The flaps are usually four, sometimes five or six. I am sure he counts them. You have seen a pursy gentleman in black hurrying along the street and tapping his boot with a cane, as though keeping time. Fancy this gentleman in the air, dressed in feathers, his coat-skirt sheared off alarmingly short and square, and looking like a cherub in jet, all head and wings,--although John is not exactly a cherub in his habits. A white spot on each wing adds a bit of the harlequin to his style.

A special endowment of this immediate locality is a large and permanent sheet of water, three or four miles by one, which bears, and deserves, the name of Eagle Lake. For, though overhung by no cliffs or lofty pines, it is far more the haunt of eagles, of both the bald and the gray species, than most tarns possessing those appendages of the romantic. Its dense fringe of fine trees, among them live-oaks a single one of which would make the fortune of an average city park, can well spare the Conifers. They are all hung with Spanish moss, a feature which conflicts with the impression of lack of moisture conveyed by the light ashen color of the bark and short annual growth of many of the smaller trees. Here and there tiny inlets are overhung with undergrowth which supplies a safe nesting-place to a multitude of birds of many kinds. The surface of the lake I have never seen free from ducks of one species or another, and generally of half a dozen. Almost the whole family, if we except the canvas-back and the red-head, visit it at one or another period. One item in their bill of fare is the nut of the water-lily, the receptacles of which, resembling the rose of a watering-pot, dot the shallows in great quantity. The green, cable-like roots of this plant are afloat, forming at some points heavy windrows. Some say they are torn up from the bottom by the alligators; but it is more probable that they are loosened and broken by the continual tugging of the divers. The alligators are not vegetarians, and they are not using their snouts much at this season. The young shoots of the Nymphaea are doubtless tempting food, as those of the Vallisneria are on the Chesapeake and the North Carolina sounds. Sustenance may be drawn also from the roots of the rushes and reeds which cover with their yellow stems and leaves many acres of the lake, and are thronged now by several species of small birds.

Hawks, of course, are always in sight, and that in astonishing variety, from the osprey down to two or three varieties of the sparrow-hawk. A monograph on the Raptores of Eagle Lake would be a most comprehensive work. The osprey, notwithstanding the abundance of his scaly prey, is not common: probably the field is too limited for him. Ducks are the attraction of the other large species. In summer, ducks are rather secondary among the water-birds, the ibis, water-turkey, and flamingo imparting a tropical character to the scene that somewhat obscures the more familiar forms. There is even a survival here of birds that have nearly disappeared from the American fauna,--the paroquet, once so common in the Mississippi Valley as far north as the Ohio, being sometimes seen, and, if I mistake not, a second species of humming-bird straying north by way of Mexico.

The old, old story! how pat it comes in! How could it have failed to come in, when the talk is of birds?

EDWARD C. BRUCE.

THE FERRYMAN'S FEE.

"I am going," said the professor to his friend Miss Eldridge, "to marry a young woman whose mind I can mould."

Somebody was uncharitable enough to say that he couldn't possibly make it any mouldier than his own. This was a slander. In the high dry Greek atmosphere which surrounded and enclosed his mind, mould, which requires dampness before it can exist, was an impossibility.

When an engagement is announced, it is almost invariably followed by one question, with a variable termination. The dear five hundred friends exclaim, with uplifted hands,--

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