Puck says he will put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.

At what rate is that per second, taking the circumference of the earth at 27,000 miles, more or less? There is a question for the mechanics, somewhat about as difficult of solution as Lord Brougham's celebrated one of the Smuggler and the Revenue Cutter--for the solution of which he recommended the aid of algebra. It is not so quick as you would imagine.

We forget the usual rate of a cannon-ball in good condition, when he is in training--and before he is at all blown. So do we forget, we are sorry to confess, the number of centuries that it would take a good, stout, well-made, able-bodied cannon-ball, to accomplish a journey to our planet from one of the fixed stars. The great difficulty, we confess, would be to get him safely conveyed thither. If that could be done, we should have no fear of his finding his way back, if not in our time, in that of our posterity. However red-hot he might have been on starting, he would be cool enough, no doubt, on his arrival at the goal; yet we should have no objection to back him against Time for a trifle--Time, we observe, in almost all matches being beat, often indeed by the most miserable hacks, that can with difficulty raise a gallop.

Time, however, possibly runs booty; for when he does make play, it must be confessed that he is a spanker, and that nothing has been seen with such a stride since Eclipse.

O beautiful and beloved Highland Parish! in whose dashing glens our beating heart first felt the awe of solitude, and learned to commune (alas! to what purpose?) with the tumult of its own thoughts! The circuit of thy skies was indeed a glorious arena spread over the mountain-tops for the combats of the great birds of prey! One wild cry or another was in the lift--of the hawk, or the glead, or the raven, or the eagle--or when those fiends slept, of the peaceful heron, and sea-bird by wandering boys pursued in its easy flight, till the snow-white child of ocean wavered away far inland, as if in search of a steadfast happiness unknown on the restless waves. Seldom did the eagle stoop to the challenge of the inferior fowl; but when he did, it was like a mailed knight treading down unknown men in battle. The hawks, and the gleads, and the ravens, and the carrion-crows, and the hooded-crows, and the rooks, and the magpies, and all the rest of the rural militia, forgetting their own feuds, sometimes came sallying from all quarters, with even a few facetious jackdaws from the old castle, to show fight with the monarch of the air. Amidst all that multitude of wings winnowing the wind, was heard the sough and whizz of those mighty vans, as the Royal Bird, himself an army, performed his majestic evolutions with all the calm confidence of a master in the art of aerial war, now shooting up half-a-thousand feet perpendicular, and now suddenly plump-down into the rear of the croaking, cawing, and chattering battalions, cutting off their retreat to the earth. Then the rout became general, the missing, however, far outnumbering the dead. Keeping possession of the field of battle, hung the eagle for a short while motionless--till with one fierce yell of triumph he seemed to seek the sun, and disappear like a speck in the light, surveying half of Scotland at a glance, and a thousand of her isles.

Some people have a trick of describing incidents as having happened within their own observation, when in fact they were at the time lying asleep in bed, and disturbing the whole house with the snore of their dormitory. Such is too often the character of the eyewitnesses of the present age. Now, we would not claim personal acquaintance with an incident we had not seen--no, not for a hundred guineas per sheet; and, therefore, we warn the reader not to believe the following little story about an eagle and child (by the way, that is the Derby crest, and a favourite sign of inns in the north of England) on our authority. "I tell the tale as 'twas told to me," by the schoolmaster of Naemanslaws, in the shire of Ayr; and if the incident never occurred, then must he have been one of the greatest liars that ever taught the young idea how to shoot. For our single selves, we are by nature credulous. Many extraordinary things happen in this life, and though "seeing is believing," so likewise "believing is seeing," as every one must allow who reads these our Recreations.

Almost all the people in the parish were leading in their meadow-hay (there were not in all its ten miles square twenty acres of ryegrass) on the same day of midsummer, so drying was the sunshine and the wind,--and huge heaped-up wains, that almost hid from view the horses that drew them along the sward, beginning to get green with second growth, were moving in all directions towards the snug farmyards. Never had the parish seemed before so populous. Jocund was the balmy air with laughter, whistle, and song. But the Tree-gnomons threw the shadow of "one o'clock" on the green dial-face of the earth--the horses were unyoked, and took instantly to grazing--groups of men, women, lads, lasses, and children collected under grove, and bush, and hedgerow--graces were pronounced, some of them rather too tedious in presence of the mantling milk-cans, bullion-bars of butter, and crackling cakes; and the great Being who gave them that day their daily bread, looked down from his Eternal Throne, well pleased with the piety of his thankful creatures.

The great Golden Eagle, the pride and the pest of the parish, stooped down, and away with something in his talons. One single sudden female shriek--and then shouts and outcries as if a church spire had tumbled down on a congregation at a sacrament. "Hannah Lamond's bairn! Hannah Lamond's bairn!" was the loud fast-spreading cry. "The Eagle's taen aff Hannah Lamond's bairn!" and many hundred feet were in another instant hurrying towards the mountain. Two miles of hill and dale, and copse and shingle, and many intersecting brooks, lay between; but in an incredibly short time the foot of the mountain was alive with people. The eyrie was well known, and both old birds were visible on the rock-ledge. But who shall scale that dizzy cliff, which Mark Steuart the sailor, who had been at the storming of many a fort, once attempted in vain? All kept gazing, or weeping, or wringing of hands, rooted to the ground, or running back and forwards, like so many ants, essaying their new wings, in discomfiture. "What's the use--what's the use o' ony puir human means? We have nae power but in prayer!" And many knelt down--fathers and mothers thinking of their own babies--as if they would force the deaf heavens to hear.

Hannah Lamond had been all this while sitting on a stone, with a face perfectly white, and eyes like those of a mad person, fixed on the eyrie. Nobody noticed her; for strong as all sympathies with her had been at the swoop of the Eagle, they were now swallowed up in the agony of eyesight. "Only last Sabbath was my sweet wee wean baptised in the name o' the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost!" and on uttering these words, she flew off through the brakes and over the huge stones, up--up--up--faster than ever huntsman ran in to the death--fearless as a goat playing among the precipices. No one doubted, no one could doubt, that she would soon be dashed to pieces. But have not people who walk in their sleep, obedient to the mysterious guidance of dreams, clomb the walls of old ruins, and found footing, even in decrepitude, along the edge of unguarded battlements, and down dilapidated stair-cases deep as draw-wells or coal-pits, and returned with open, fixed, and unseeing eyes, unharmed, to their beds at midnight? It is all the work of the soul, to whom the body is a slave; and shall not the agony of a mother's passion--who sees her baby, whose warm mouth had just left her breast, hurried off by a demon to a hideous death--bear her limbs aloft wherever there is dust to dust, till she reach that devouring den, and fiercer and more furious than any bird of prey that ever bathed its beak in blood, throttle the fiends that with their heavy wing would fain flap her down the cliffs, and hold up her child in deliverance?

No stop--no stay--she knew not that she drew her breath. Beneath her feet Providence fastened every loose stone, and to her hands strengthened every root. How was she ever to descend? That fear, then, but once crossed her heart, as up--up--up--to the little image made of her own flesh and blood. "The God who holds me now from perishing--will not the same God save me when my child is at my breast?" Down came the fierce rushing of the Eagle's wings--each savage bird dashing close to her head, so that she saw the yellow of their wrathful eyes. All at once they quailed, and were cowed. Yelling, they flew off to the stump of an ash jutting out of a cliff, a thousand feet above the cataract; and the Christian mother, falling across the eyrie, in the midst of bones and blood, clasped her child--dead--dead--no doubt--but unmangled and untorn, and swaddled up just as it was when she laid it down asleep among the fresh hay in a nook of the harvest-field. Oh! what pang of perfect blessedness transfixed her heart from that faint, feeble cry--"It lives! it lives! it lives!" and baring her bosom, with loud laughter, and eyes dry as stones, she felt the lips of the unconscious innocent once more murmuring at the fount of life and love. "O, thou great and thou dreadful God! whither hast thou brought me--one of the most sinful of thy creatures? Oh! save me lest I perish, even for thy own name's sake! O Thou, who died to save sinners, have mercy upon me!"

Cliffs, chasms, blocks of stone, and the skeletons of old trees--far--far down--and dwindled into specks a thousand creatures of her own kind, stationary, or running to and fro! Was that the sound of the waterfall, or the faint roar of voices? Is that her native strath?--and that tuft of trees, does it contain the hut in which stands the cradle of her child? Never more shall it be rocked by her foot! Here must she die--and when her breast is exhausted--her baby too. And those horrid beaks, and eyes, and talons, and wings will return, and her child will be devoured at last, even within the dead arms that can protect it no more.

Where, all this while, was Mark Steuart, the sailor? Half-way up the cliffs. But his eyes had got dim, and his head dizzy, and his heart sick--and he who had so often reefed the topgallant-sail, when at midnight the coming of the gale was heard afar, covered his face with his hands, and dared look no longer on the swimming heights. "And who will take care of my poor bedridden mother?" thought Hannah, who, through exhaustion of so many passions, could no more retain in her grasp the hope she had clutched in despair. A voice whispered, "God."

She looked round expecting to see a spirit; but nothing moved except a rotten branch, that, under its own weight, broke off from the crumbling rock. Her eye--by some secret sympathy with the inanimate object--watched its fall; and it seemed to stop, not far off, on a small platform. Her child was bound upon her shoulders--she knew not how or when--but it was safe--and scarcely daring to open her eyes, she slid down the shelving rocks, and found herself on a small piece of firm root-bound soil, with the tops of bushes appearing below. With fingers suddenly strengthened into the power of iron, she swung herself down by brier, and broom, and heather, and dwarf-birch. There, a loosened stone leapt over a ledge and no sound was heard, so profound was its fall.

There, the shingle rattled down the screes, and she hesitated not to follow. Her feet bounded against the huge stone that stopped them; but she felt no pain. Her body was callous as the cliff. Steep as the wall of a house was now the side of the precipice. But it was matted with ivy centuries old--long ago dead, and without a single green leaf--but with thousands of arm-thick stems petrified into the rock, and covering it as with a trellice. She felt her baby on her neck--and with hands and feet clung to that fearful ladder. Turning round her head, and looking down, she saw the whole population of the parish--so great was the multitude--on their knees. She heard the voice of psalms--a hymn breathing the spirit of one united prayer. Sad and solemn was the strain--but nothing dirge-like--sounding not of death, but deliverance.

Often had she sung that tune--perhaps the very words--but them she heard not--in her own hut, she and her mother--or in the kirk, along with all the congregation. An unseen hand seemed fastening her fingers to the ribs of ivy, and in sudden inspiration, believing that her life was to be saved, she became almost as fearless as if she had been changed into a winged creature. Again her feet touched stones and earth--the psalm was hushed--but a tremulous sobbing voice was close beside her, and a she-goat, with two little kids at her feet. "Wild heights," thought she, "do these creatures climb--but the dam will lead down her kids by the easiest paths; for in the brute creatures holy is the power of a mother's love!" and turning round her head, she kissed her sleeping baby, and for the first time she wept.

Overhead frowned the front of the precipice, never touched before by human hand or foot. No one had ever dreamt of scaling it, and the Golden Eagles knew that well in their instinct, as, before they built their eyrie, they had brushed it with their wings. But the downwards part of the mountain-side, though scarred, and seamed, and chasmed, was yet accessible--and more than one person in the parish had reached the bottom of the Glead's Cliff. Many were now attempting it--and ere the cautious mother had followed her dumb guides a hundred yards, through among dangers that, although enough to terrify the stoutest heart, were traversed by her without a shudder, the head of one man appeared, and then the head of another, and she knew that God had delivered her and her child into the care of their fellow-creatures. Not a word was spoken--she hushed her friends with her hands--and with uplifted eyes pointed to the guides sent to her by Heaven. Small green plats, where those creatures nibble the wildflowers, became now more frequent--trodden lines, almost as plain as sheep-paths, showed that the dam had not led her young into danger; and now the brushwood dwindled away into straggling shrubs, and the party stood on a little eminence above the stream, and forming part of the strath.

There had been trouble and agitation, much sobbing and many tears, among the multitude, while the mother was scaling the cliffs--sublime was the shout that echoed afar the moment she reached the eyrie--then had succeeded a silence deep as death--in a little while arose that hymning prayer, succeeded by mute supplication--the wildness of thankful and congratulatory joy had next its sway--and now that her salvation was sure, the great crowd rustled like a wind-swept wood. And for whose sake was all this alternation of agony? A poor humble creature, unknown to many even by name--one who had had but few friends, nor wished for more--contented to work all day, here--there--anywhere--that she might be able to support her aged mother and her child--and who on Sabbath took her seat in an obscure pew, set apart for paupers, in the kirk.

"Fall back, and give her fresh air," said the old minister of the parish; and the ring of close faces widened round her lying as in death.

"Gie me the bonny bit bairn into my arms," cried first one mother and then another, and it was tenderly handed round the circle of kisses, many of the snooded maidens bathing its face in tears. "There's no a single scratch about the puir innocent, for the Eagle, you see, maun hae stuck its talons into the lang claes and the shawl. Blin', blin' maun they be who see not the finger o' God in this thing!"

Hannah started up from her swoon--and, looking wildly round, cried, "Oh!

the Bird--the Bird!--the Eagle--the Eagle!--the Eagle has carried off my bonny wee Walter--is there nane to pursue?" A neighbour put her baby into her breast; and shutting her eyes, and smiting her forehead, the sorely bewildered creature said in a low voice, "Am I wauken--oh! tell me if I'm wauken--or if a' this be but the wark o' a fever."

Hannah Lamond was not yet twenty years old, and although she was a mother--and you may guess what a mother--yet--frown not, fair and gentle reader--frown not, pure and stainless as thou art--to her belonged not the sacred name of wife--and that baby was the child of sin and of shame--yes--"the child of misery, baptised in tears!" She had loved--trusted--been betrayed--and deserted. In sorrow and solitude--uncomforted and despised--she bore her burden. Dismal had been the hour of travail--and she feared her mother's heart would have broken, even when her own was cleft in twain. But how healing is forgiveness--alike to the wounds of the forgiving and the forgiven! And then Hannah knew that, although guilty before God, her guilt was not such as her fellow-creatures deemed it--for there were dreadful secrets which should never pass her lips against the father of her child. So she bowed down her young head, and soiled it with the ashes of repentance--walking with her eyes on the ground as she again entered the kirk--yet not fearing to lift them up to heaven during the prayer. Her sadness inspired a general pity--she was excluded from no house she had heart to visit--no coarse comment, no ribald jest accompanied the notice people took of her baby--no licentious rustic presumed on her frailty; for the pale, melancholy face of the nursing mother, weeping as she sung the lullaby, forbade all such approach--and an universal sentiment of indignation drove from the parish the heartless and unprincipled seducer--if all had been known, too weak word for his crime--who left thus to pine in sorrow, and in shame far worse than sorrow, one who till her unhappy fall had been held up by every mother as an example to her daughters.

Never had she striven to cease to love her betrayer--but she had striven--and an appeased conscience had enabled her to do so--to think not of him now that he had deserted her for ever. Sometimes his image, as well in love as in wrath, passed before the eye of her heart--but she closed it in tears of blood, and the phantom disappeared. Thus all the love towards him that slept--but was not dead--arose in yearnings of still more exceeding love towards his child. Round its head was gathered all hope of comfort--of peace--of reward of her repentance. One of its smiles was enough to brighten up the darkness of a whole day. In her breast--on her knee--in its cradle, she regarded it with a perpetual prayer. And this feeling it was, with all the overwhelming tenderness of affection, all the invigorating power of passion, that, under the hand of God, bore her up and down that fearful mountain's brow, and after the hour of rescue and deliverance, stretched her on the greensward like a corpse.

The rumour of the miracle circled the mountain's base, and a strange story without names had been told to the Wood-ranger of the Cairn-Forest, by a wayfaring man. Anxious to know what truth there was in it, he crossed the hill, and making his way through the sullen crowd, went up to the eminence, and beheld her whom he had so wickedly ruined, and so basely deserted. Hisses, and groans, and hootings, and fierce eyes, and clenched hands assailed and threatened him on every side.

His heart died within him, not in fear, but in remorse. What a worm he felt himself to be! And fain would he have become a worm, that, to escape all that united human scorn, he might have wriggled away in slime into some hole of the earth. But the meek eye of Hannah met his in forgiveness--an un-upbraiding tear--a faint smile of love. All his better nature rose within him, all his worse nature was quelled. "Yes, good people, you do right to cover me with your scorn. But what is your scorn to the wrath of God? The Evil One has often been with me in the woods; the same voice that once whispered me to murder her--but here I am--not to offer retribution--for that may not--will not--must not be--guilt must not mate with innocence. But here I proclaim that innocence. I deserve death, and I am willing here, on this spot, to deliver myself into the hands of justice. Allan Calder--I call on you to seize your prisoner."

The moral sense of the people, when instructed by knowledge and enlightened by religion, what else is it but the voice of God! Their anger subsided into a stern satisfaction--and that soon softened, in sight of her who alone aggrieved alone felt nothing but forgiveness, into a confused compassion for the man who, bold and bad as he had been, had undergone many solitary torments, and nearly fallen in his uncompanioned misery into the power of the Prince of Darkness. The old clergyman, whom all reverenced, put the contrite man's hand in hers, whom he swore to love and cherish all his days. And, ere summer was over, Hannah was the mistress of a family, in a house not much inferior to a Manse. Her mother, now that not only her daughter's reputation was freed from stain, but her innocence also proved, renewed her youth. And although the worthy schoolmaster, who told us the tale so much better than we have been able to repeat it, confessed that the wood-ranger never became altogether a saint--nor acquired the edifying habit of pulling down the corners of his mouth, and turning up the whites of his eyes--yet he assured us that he never afterwards heard anything very serious laid to his prejudice--that he became in due time an elder of the Kirk--gave his children a religious education--erring only in making rather too much of a pet of his eldest born, whom, even when grown up to manhood, he never called by any other name than the Eaglet.

CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY.

THIRD CANTICLE.

The Raven! In a solitary glen sits down on a stone the roaming pedestrian, beneath the hush and gloom of a thundery sky that has not yet begun to growl, and hears no sounds but that of an occasional big rain-drop, plashing on the bare bent; the crag high overhead sometimes utters a sullen groan--the pilgrim, starting, listens, and the noise is repeated, but instead of a groan, a croak--croak--croak! manifestly from a thing with life. A pause of silence! and hollower and hoarser the croak is heard from the opposite side of the glen. Eyeing the black sultry heaven, he feels the warm plash on his face, but sees no bird on the wing. By-and-by something black lifts itself slowly and heavily up from a precipice, in deep shadow; and before it has cleared the rock-range, and entered the upper region of air, he knows it to be a Raven. The creature seems wroth to be disturbed in his solitude, and in his strong straight-forward flight aims at the head of another glen; but he wheels round at the iron barrier, and, alighting among the heather, folds his huge massy wings, and leaps about as if in anger, with the same savage croak--croak--croak! No other bird so like a demon--and should you chance to break a leg in the desert, and be unable to crawl to a hut, your life is not worth twenty-four hours' purchase. Never was there a single hound in Lord Darlington's packs, since his lordship became a mighty hunter, with nostrils so fine as those of that feathered fiend, covered though they be with strong hairs or bristles, that grimly adorn a bill of formidable dimensions, and apt for digging out eye-socket and splitting skull-structure of dying man or beast. That bill cannot tear in pieces like the eagle's beak, nor are its talons so powerful to smite as to compress--but a better bill for cut-and-thrust--- push, carte, and tierce--the dig dismal and the plunge profound--belongs to no other bird. It inflicts great gashes; nor needs the wound to be repeated on the same spot. Feeder foul and obscene! to thy nostril upturned "into the murky air, sagacious of thy quarry from afar," sweeter is the scent of carrion, than to the panting lover's sense and soul the fragrance of his own virgin's breath and bosom, when, lying in her innocence in his arms, her dishevelled tresses seem laden with something more ethereally pure than "Sabean odours from the spicy shores of Araby the Blest."

The Raven dislikes all animal food that has not a deathy smack. It cannot be thought that he has any reverence or awe of the mystery of life. Neither is he a coward; at least, not such a coward as to fear the dying kick of a lamb or sheep. Yet so long as his victim can stand, or sit, or lie in a strong struggle, the raven keeps aloof--hopping in a circle that narrows and narrows as the sick animal's nostrils keep dilating in convulsions, and its eyes grow dimmer and more dim. When the prey is in the last agonies, croaking, he leaps upon the breathing carcass, and whets his bill upon his own blue-ringed legs, steadied by claws in the fleece, yet not so fiercely inserted as to get entangled and fast. With his large level-crowned head bobbing up and down, and turned a little first to one side and then to another, all the while a self-congratulatory leer in his eye, he unfolds his wings, and then folds them again, twenty or thirty times, as if dubious how to begin to gratify his lust of blood; and frequently, when just on the brink of consummation, jumps off side, back, or throat, and goes dallying about, round and round, and off to a small safe distance, scenting, almost snorting, the smell of the blood running cold, colder, and more cold. At last the poor wretch is still; and then, without waiting till it is stiff, he goes to work earnestly and passionately, and taught by horrid instinct how to reach the entrails, revels in obscene gluttony, and preserves, it may be, eye, lip, palate, and brain, for the last course of his meal, gorged to the throat, incapacitated to return thanks, and with difficulty able either to croak or to fly.

The Raven, it is thought, is in the habit of living upwards of a hundred years, perhaps a couple of centuries. Children grow into girls, girls into maidens, maidens into wives, wives into widows, widows into old decrepit crones, and crones into dust; and the Raven who wons at the head of the glen, is aware of all the births, baptisms, marriages, deathbeds, and funerals. Certain it is--at least so men say--that he is aware of the deathbeds and the funerals. Often does he flap his wings against door and window of hut, when the wretch within is in extremity, or, sitting on the heather-roof, croaks horror into the dying dream. As the funeral winds its way towards the mountain cemetery he hovers aloft in the air--or, swooping down nearer to the bier, precedes the corpse like a sable saulie. While the party of friends are carousing in the house of death, he too, scorning funeral-baked meats, croaks hoarse hymns and dismal dirges as he is devouring the pet-lamb of the little grandchild of the deceased. The shepherds maintain that the Raven is sometimes heard to laugh. Why not, as well as the hyena? Then it is that he is most diabolical, for he knows that his laughter is prophetic of human death. True it is, and it would be injustice to conceal the fact, much more to deny it, that Ravens of old fed Elijah; but that was the punishment of some old sin committed by Two who before the Flood bore the human shape, and who, soon as the Ark rested on Mount Ararat, flew off to the desolation of swamped forests and the disfigured solitude of the drowned glens. Dying Ravens hide themselves from daylight in burial-places among the rocks, and are seen hobbling into their tombs, as if driven thither by a flock of fears, and crouching under a remorse that disturbs instinct, even as if it were conscience. So sings and says the Celtic superstition--muttered to us in a dream--adding that there are Raven ghosts, great black bundles of feathers, for ever in the forest, night-hunting in famine for prey, emitting a last feeble croak at the blush of dawn, and then all at once invisible.

There can be no doubt that that foolish Quaker, who some twenty years ago perished at the foot of a crag near Red Tarn, "far in the bosom of Helvyllyn," was devoured by ravens. We call him foolish, because no adherent of that sect was ever qualified to find his way among mountains when the day was shortish, and the snow, if not very deep, yet wreathed and pit-falled. In such season and weather, no place so fit for a Quaker as the fireside. Not to insist, however, on that point, with what glee the few hungry and thirsty old Ravens belonging to the Red Tarn Club must have flocked to the Ordinary! Without asking each other to which part this, that, or the other croaker chose to be helped, the maxim which regulated their behaviour at table was doubtless, "First come, first served." Forthwith each bill was busy, and the scene became animated in the extreme. There must have been great difficulty to the most accomplished of the carrion in stripping the Quaker of his drab.

The broad-brim had probably escaped with the first intention, and after going before the wind half across the unfrozen Tarn, capsized, filled, and sunk. Picture to yourself so many devils, all in glossy black feather coats and dark breeches, with waistcoats inclining to blue, pully-hawlying away at the unresisting figure of the follower of Fox, and getting first vexed and then irritated with the pieces of choking soft armour in which, five or six ply thick, his inviting carcass was so provokingly insheathed! First a drab duffle cloak--then a drab wraprascal--then a drab broadcloth coat, made in the oldest fashion--then a drab waistcoat of the same--then a drab under-waistcoat of thinner mould--then a linen-shirt, somewhat drabbish--then a flannel-shirt, entirely so, and most odorous to the nostrils of the members of the Red Tarn Club. All this must have taken a couple of days at the least; so, supposing the majority of members assembled about eight A.M. on the Sabbath morning, it must have been well on to twelve o'clock on Monday night before the club could have comfortably sat down to supper. During these two denuding days, we can well believe that the President must have been hard put to it to keep the secretary, treasurer, chaplain, and other office-bearers, ordinary and extraordinary members, from giving a sly dig at Obadiah's face, so tempting in the sallow hue and rank smell of first corruption. Dead bodies keep well in frost; but the subject had in this case probably fallen from a great height, had his bones broken to smash, his flesh bruised and mangled. The President, therefore, we repeat it, even although a raven of great age and authority, must have had inconceivable difficulty in controlling the Club. The croak of "Order!--order!--Chair!--chair!"--must have been frequent; and had the office not been hereditary, the old gentleman would no doubt have thrown it up, and declared the chair vacant. All obstacles and obstructions having been by indefatigable activity removed, no attempt, we may well believe, was made by the seneschal to place the guests according to their rank, above or below the salt, and the party sat promiscuously down to a late supper. Not a word was tittered during the first half-hour, till a queer-looking mortal, who had spent several years of his prime of birdhood at old Calgarth, and picked up a tolerable command of the Westmoreland dialect by means of the Hamiltonian system, exclaimed, "I'se weel nee brussen--there be's Mister Wudsworth--Ho, ho, ho!" It was indeed the bard, benighted in the Excursion from Patterdale to Jobson's Cherry-Tree; and the Red Tarn Club, afraid of having their orgies put into blank verse, sailed away in floating fragments beneath the moon and stars.

But over the doom of one true Lover of Nature let us shed a flood of rueful tears; for at what tale shall mortal man weep, if not at the tale of youthful genius and virtue shrouded suddenly in a winding-sheet wreathed of snow by the pitiless tempest! Elate in the joy of solitude, he hurried like a fast-travelling shadow into the silence of the frozen mountains, all beautifully encrusted with pearls, and jewels, and diamonds, beneath the resplendent night-heavens. The din of populous cities had long stunned his brain, and his soul had sickened in the presence of the money-hunting eyes of selfish men, all madly pursuing their multifarious machinations in the great mart of commerce. The very sheeted masts of ships, bearing the flags of foreign countries, in all their pomp and beauty sailing homeward or outward-bound, had become hateful to his spirit--for what were they but the floating enginery of Mammon? Truth, integrity, honour, were all recklessly sacrificed to gain by the friends he loved and had respected most--sacrificed without shame and without remorse--repentance being with them a repentance only over ill-laid schemes of villany--plans for the ruination of widows and orphans, blasted in the bud of their iniquity. The brother of his bosom made him a bankrupt--and for a year the jointure of his widow-mother was unpaid. But she died before the second Christmas--and he was left alone in the world. Poor indeed he was, but not a beggar. A legacy came to him from a distant relation--almost the only one of his name--who died abroad. Small as it was, it was enough to live on--and his enthusiastic spirit gathering joy from distress, vowed to dedicate itself in some profound solitude to the love of Nature, and the study of her Great Laws. He bade an eternal farewell to cities at the dead of midnight, beside his mother's grave, scarcely distinguishable among the thousand flat stones, sunk, or sinking into the wide churchyard, along which a great thoroughfare of life roared like the sea. And now, for the first time, his sorrow flung from him like a useless garment, he found himself alone among the Cumbrian mountains, and impelled in strong idolatry almost to kneel down and worship the divine beauty of the moon, and "stars that are the poetry of heaven."

Not uninstructed was the wanderer in the lore that links the human heart to the gracious form and aspects of the Mighty Mother. In early youth he had been intended for the Church, and subsequent years of ungrateful and ungenial toils had not extinguished the fine scholarship that native aptitude for learning had acquired in the humble school of the village in which he was born. He had been ripe for College when the sudden death of his father, who had long been at the head of a great mercantile concern, imposed it upon him, as a sacred duty owed to his mother and his sisters, to embark in trade. Not otherwise could he hope ever to retrieve their fortunes--and for ten years for their sake he was a slave, till ruin set him free. Now he was master of his own destiny--and sought some humble hut in that magnificent scenery, where he might pass a blameless life, and among earth's purest joys prepare his soul for heaven. Many such humble huts had he seen during that one bold, bright, beautiful spring winter-day. Each wreath of smoke from the breathing chimneys, while the huts themselves seemed hardly awakened from sleep in the morning-calm, led his imagination up into the profound peace of the sky. In any one of those dwellings, peeping from sheltered dells, or perched on wind-swept eminences, could he have taken up his abode, and sat down contented at the board of their simple inmates. But in the very delirium of a new bliss, the day faded before him--twilight looked lovelier than dream-land in the reflected glimmer of the snow--and thus had midnight found him, in a place so utterly lonesome in its remoteness from all habitations, that even in summer no stranger sought it without the guidance of some shepherd familiar with the many bewildering passes that stretched away in all directions through among the mountains to distant vales. No more fear or thought had he of being lost in the wilderness, than the ring-dove that flies from forest to forest in the winter season, and, without the aid even of vision, trusts to the instinctive wafting of her wings through the paths of ether.

As he continued gazing on the heavens, the moon all at once lost something of her brightness--the stars seemed fewer in number--and the lustre of the rest as by mist obscured. The blue ethereal frame grew discoloured with streaks of red and yellow--and a sort of dim darkness deepened and deepened on the air, while the mountains appeared higher, and at the same time further off, as if he had been transported in a dream to another region of the earth. A sound was heard, made up of far-mustering winds, echoes from caves, swinging of trees, and the murmur as of a great lake or sea beginning to break on the shore. A few flakes of snow touched his face, and the air grew cold. A clear tarn had a few minutes before glittered with moonbeams, but now it had disappeared. Sleet came thicker and faster, and ere long it was a storm of snow. "O God! my last hour is come!" and scarcely did he hear his own voice in the roaring tempest.

Men have died in dungeons--and their skeletons been found long years afterwards lying on the stone floor, in postures that told through what hideous agonies they had passed into the world of spirits. But no eye saw, no ear heard, and the prison-visitor gathers up, as he shudders, but a dim conviction of some long horror from the bones. One day in spring--long after the snows were melted--except here and there a patch like a flock of sheep on some sunless exposure--a huge Raven rose heavily, as if gorged with prey, before the feet of a shepherd, who, going forward to the spot where the bird had been feeding, beheld a rotting corpse! A dog, itself almost a skeleton, was lying near, and began to whine at his approach. On its collar was the name of its master--a name unknown in that part of the country--and weeks elapsed before any person could be heard of that could tell the history of the sufferer. A stranger came and went--taking the faithful creature with him that had so long watched by the dead--but long before his arrival the remains had been interred; and you may see the grave, a little way on from the south gate, on your right hand as you enter, not many yards from the Great Yew-Tree in the churchyard of----, not far from the foot of Ullswater.

Gentle reader! we have given you two versions of the same story--and pray, which do you like the best? The first is the most funny, the second the most affecting. We have observed that the critics are not decided on the question of our merits as a writer; some maintaining that we are strongest in humour--others, that our power is in pathos. The judicious declare that our forte lies in both--in the two united, or alternating with each other. "But is it not quite shocking," exclaims some scribbler who has been knouted in Ebony, "to hear so very serious an affair as the death of a Quaker in the snow among mountains, treated with such heartless levity? The man who wrote that description, sir, of the Ordinary of the Red Tarn Club, would not scruple to commit murder!"

Why, if killing a scribbler be murder, the writer of that--this--article confesses that he has more than once committed that capital crime. But no intelligent jury, taking into consideration the law as well as the fact--and it is often their duty to do so, let high authorities say what they will--would for a moment hesitate, in any of the cases alluded to, to bring in a verdict of "Justifiable homicide." The gentleman or lady who has honoured us so far with perusal, knows enough of human life, and of their own hearts, to know also that there is no other subject which men of genius--and who ever denied that we are men of genius?--have been accustomed to view in so many ludicrous lights as this same subject of death; and the reason is at once obvious--yet _recherche_--videlicet, Death is, in itself and all that belongs to it, such a sad, cold, wild, dreary, dismal, distracting, and dreadful thing, that at times men talking about it cannot choose but laugh!

Too-hoo--too-hoo--too-whit-too-hoo!--we have got among the OWLS.

Venerable personages, in truth, they are--perfect Solomons! The spectator, as in most cases of very solemn characters, feels himself at first strongly disposed to commit the gross indecorum of bursting out a-laughing in their face. One does not see the absolute necessity either of man or bird looking at all times so unaccountably wise. Why will an Owl persist in his stare? Why will a Bishop never lay aside his wig?

People ignorant of Ornithology will stare like the Bird of Wisdom himself on being told that an OWL is an Eagle. Yet, bating a little inaccuracy, it is so. Eagles, kites, hawks, and owls, all belong to the genus Falco. We hear a great deal too much in poetry of the moping Owl, the melancholy Owl, the boding Owl, whereas he neither mopes nor bodes, and is no more melancholy than becomes a gentleman. We also hear of the Owl being addicted to spirituous liquors; and hence the expression, as drunk as an Owl. All this is mere Whig personality, the Owl being a Tory of the old school, and a friend of the ancient establishments of church and state. Nay, the same political party, although certainly the most shortsighted of God's creatures, taunt the Owl with being blind. As blind as an Owl, is a libel in frequent use out of ornithological society. Shut up Lord Jeffrey himself in a hay-barn with a well-built mow, and ask him in the darkness to catch you a few mice, and he will tell you whether or not the Owl be blind. This would be just as fair as to expect the Owl to see, like Lord Jeffrey, through a case in the Parliament House during daylight. Nay, we once heard a writer in Taylor and Hessey call the Owl stupid, he himself having longer ears than any species of Owl extant. What is the positive character of the Owl may perhaps appear by-and-by; but we have seen that, describing his character by negations, we may say that he resembles Napoleon Buonaparte much more than Joseph Hume or Alderman Wood. He is not moping--not boding--not melancholy--not a drunkard--not blind--not stupid; as much as it would be prudent to say of any man, whether editor or contributor, in her Majesty's dominions.

We really have no patience with people who persist in all manner of misconceptions regarding the character of birds. Birds often appear to such persons, judging from, of, and by themselves, to be in mind and manners the reverse of their real character. They judge the inner bird by outward circumstances inaccurately observed. There is the owl. How little do the people of England know of him--even of him the barn-door and domestic owl--yea, even at this day--we had almost said the Poets!

Shakespeare, of course, and his freres, knew him to be a merry fellow--quite a madcap--and so do now all the Lakers. But Cowper had his doubts about it; and Gray, as every schoolboy knows, speaks of him like an old wife. The force of folly can go no further, than to imagine an owl complaining to the moon of being disturbed by people walking in a country churchyard. And among all our present bardlings, the owl is supposed to be constantly on the eve of suicide. If it were really so, he ought in a Christian country to be pitied, not pelted, as he is sure to be when accidentally seen in sunlight--for melancholy is a misfortune, especially when hereditary and constitutional, as it is popularly believed to be in the Black-billed Bubo, and certainly was in Dr Johnson. In young masters and misses we can pardon any childishness; but we cannot pardon the antipathy to the owl entertained by the manly minds of grown-up English clodhoppers, ploughmen, and threshers. They keep terriers to kill rats and mice in barns, and they shoot the owls, any one of whom we would cheerfully back against the famous Billy. "The very commonest observation teaches us," says the author of the "Gardens of the Menagerie," "that they are in reality the best and most efficient protectors of our cornfields and granaries from the devastating pillage of the swarms of mice and other small _rodents_." Nay, by their constant destruction of these petty but dangerous enemies, the owls, he says, "earn an unquestionable title to be regarded as among the _most active of the friends of man_; a title which only one or two among them occasionally forfeit by their aggressions on the defenceless poultry."

Roger or Dolly beholds him in the act of murdering a duckling, and, like other light-headed, giddy, unthinking creatures, they forget all the service he has done the farm, the parish, and the state; he is shot _in the act_, and nailed, wide-extended in cruel spread-eagle, on the barn-door. Others again call him dull and shortsighted--nay, go the length of asserting that he is stupid--as stupid as an owl. Why, our excellent fellow, when you have the tithe of the talent of the common owl, and know half as well how to use it, you may claim the medal.

The eagles, kites, and hawks, hunt by day. The Owl is the Nimrod of the Night. Then, like one who shall be nameless, he sails about seeking those whom he may devour. To do him justice, he has a truly ghost-like head and shoulders of his own. What horror to the "small birds rejoicing in spring's leafy bowers," fast-locked we were going to say in each other's arms, but sitting side by side in the same cosy nuptial nest, to be startled out of their love-dreams by the great lamp-eyed, beaked face of a horrible monster with horns, picked out of feathered bed, and wafted off in one bunch, within talons, to pacify a set of hissing, and snappish, and shapeless powder-puffs, in the loophole of a barn? In a house where a cat is kept, mice are much to be pitied. They are so infatuated with the smell of a respectable larder, that to leave the premises, they confess, is impossible. Yet every hour--nay, every minute of their lives--must they be in the fear of being leaped out upon by four velvet paws--and devoured with kisses from a whiskered mouth, and a throat full of that incomprehensible music--a purr. Life, on such terms, seems to us anything but desirable. But the truth is, that mice in the fields are not a whit better off. Owls are cats with wings. Skimming along the grass tops, they stop in a momentary hover, let drop a talon, and away with Mus, his wife, and small family of blind children. It is the white, or yellow, or barn, or church, or Screech-Owl, or Gilley-Owlet, that behaves in this way; and he makes no bones of a mouse, uniformly swallowing him alive. Our friend, we suspect, though no drunkard, is somewhat of a glutton. In one thing we agree with him, that there is no sort of harm in a heavy supper. There, however, we are guilty of some confusion of ideas; for what to us, who rise in the morning, seems a supper, is to him who gets up at evening twilight, a breakfast. We therefore agree with him in thinking that there is no sort of harm in a heavy breakfast. After having passed a pleasant night in eating and flirting, he goes to bed betimes about four o'clock in the morning; and, as Bewick observes, makes a blowing hissing noise, resembling the snoring of a man. Indeed nothing can be more diverting to a person annoyed by blue devils, than to look at a white Owl and his wife asleep. With their heads gently inclined towards each other, there they keep snoring away like any Christian couple. Should the one make a pause, the other that instant awakes, and, fearing something may be wrong with his spouse, opens a pair of glimmering winking eyes, and inspects the adjacent physiognomy with the scrutinising stare of a village apothecary. If all be right, the concert is resumed, the snore sometimes degenerating into a sort of snivel, and the snivel into a blowing hiss. First time we heard this noise was in a churchyard when we were mere boys, having ventured in after dark to catch the minister's colt for a gallop over to the parish capital, where there was a dancing-school ball. There had been a nest of Owls in some hole in the spire; but we never doubted for a moment that the noise of snoring, blowing, hissing, and snapping proceeded from a testy old gentleman that had been buried that forenoon, and had come alive again a day after the fair. Had we reasoned the matter a little, we must soon have convinced ourselves that there was no ground for alarm to us at least; for the noise was like that of some one half stifled, and little likely to heave up from above him a six-feet-deep load of earth--to say nothing of the improbability of his being able to unscrew the coffin from the inside.

Be that as it may, we cleared about a dozen of decent tombstones at three jumps--the fourth took us over a wall five feet high within and about fifteen without, and landed us, with a squash, in a cabbage-garden, enclosed on the other three sides by a house and a holly-hedge. The house was the sexton's, who, apprehending the stramash to proceed from a resurrectionary surgeon mistaken in his latitude, thrust out a long duck-gun from a window in the thatch, and swore to blow out our brains if we did not instantly surrender ourselves, and deliver up the corpse. It was in vain to cry out our name, which he knew as well as his own. He was deaf to reason, and would not withdraw his patterero till we had laid down the corpse. He swore that he saw the sack in the moonlight. This was a horse-cloth with which we had intended to saddle the "cowt," and that had remained, during the supernatural agency under which we laboured, clutched unconsciously and convulsively in our grasp. Long was it ere Davie Donald would see us in our true light--but at length he drew on his Kilmarnock nightcap, and coming out with a bouet, let us through the trance and out of the front door, thoroughly convinced, till we read Bewick, that old Southfield was not dead, although in a very bad way indeed. Let this be a lesson to schoolboys not to neglect the science of natural history, and to study the character of the White Owl.

OWLS--both White and common Brown, are not only useful in a mountainous country, but highly ornamental. How serenely beautiful their noiseless flight; a flake of snow is not winnowed through the air more softly-silent! Gliding along the dark shadows of a wood, how spiritual the motion--how like the thought of a dream! And then, during the hushed midnight hours, how jocund the whoop and hollo from the heart of a sycamore--grey rock, or ivied Tower! How the Owls of Windermere must laugh at the silly Lakers, that under the garish eye of day, enveloped in clouds of dust, whirl along in rattling post-shays in pursuit of the picturesque! Why, the least imaginative Owl that ever hunted mice by moonlight on the banks of Windermere, must know the character of its scenery better than any poetaster that ever dined on char at Bowness or Lowood. The long quivering lines of light illumining some sylvan isle--the evening-star shining from the water to its counterpart in the sky--the glorious phenomenon of the double moon--the night-colours of the woods--and, once in the three years perhaps, that loveliest and most lustrous of celestial forms, the lunar rainbow--all these and many more beauteous and magnificent sights are familiar to the Owls of Windermere.

And who know half so well as they do the echoes of Furness, and Applethwaite, and Loughrigg, and Landale, all the way on to Dungeon-Gill and Pavey-Ark, Scawfell and the Great Gable, and that sea of mountains, of which every wave has a name? Midnight--when asleep so still and silent--seems inspired with the joyous spirit of the Owls in their revelry--and answers to their mirth and merriment through all her clouds. The Moping Owl, indeed!--the Boding Owl, forsooth!--the Melancholy Owl, you blockhead!--why, they are the most cheerful--joy-portending--and exulting of God's creatures! Their flow of animal spirits is incessant--crowing-cocks are a joke to them--blue devils are to them unknown--not one hypochondriac in a thousand barns--and the Man-in-the-Moon acknowledges that he never heard one of them utter a complaint.

But what say ye to an Owl, not only like an eagle in plumage, but equal to the largest eagle in size--and therefore named, from the King of Birds, the EAGLE OWL. Mr Selby! you have done justice to the monarch of the Bubos. We hold ourselves to be persons of tolerable courage, as the world goes--but we could not answer for ourselves showing fight with such a customer, were he to waylay us by night in a wood. In comparison, Jack Thurtell looked harmless. No--that bold, bright-eyed murderer, with Horns on his head like those on Michael Angelo's statue of Moses, would never have had the cruel cowardice to cut the weasand, and smash out the brains of such a miserable wretch as Weare! True, he is fond of blood--and where's the harm in that? It is his nature. But if there be any truth in the science of Physiognomy--and be that of Phrenology what it will, most assuredly there is truth in it--the original of that Owl, for whose portrait the world is indebted to Mr Selby, and Sir Thomas Lawrence never painted a finer one of Prince or Potentate of any Holy or Unholy Alliance, must have despised Probert from the very bottom of his heart. No prudent Eagle but would be exceedingly desirous of keeping on good terms with him--devilish shy, i' faith, of giving him any offence by the least hauteur of manner, or the slightest violation of etiquette.

An Owl of this character and calibre is not afraid to show his horns at mid-day on the mountain. The Fox is not over and above fond of him--and his claws can kill a cub at a blow. The Doe sees the monster sitting on the back of her fawn, and, maternal instinct overcome by horror, bounds into the brake, and leaves the pretty creature to its fate. Thank Heaven, he is, in Great Britain, a rare bird! Tempest-driven across the Northern Ocean from his native forests in Russia, an occasional visitant he "frightens this isle from its propriety," and causes a hideous screaming through every wood he haunts. Some years ago, one was killed in the upland moors in the county of Durham--and, of course, paid a visit to Mr Bullock's Museum. Eagle-like in all its habits, it builds its nest on high rocks--sometimes on the loftiest trees--and seldom lays more than two eggs. One is one more than enough--and we who fly by night trust never to fall in with a live specimen of the Strix-Bubo of Linnaeus.

But largest and loveliest of all the silent night-gliders--the SNOWY OWL! Gentle reader--if you long to see his picture, we have told you where it may be found;--and in the College Museum, within a glass vase on the central table in the Palace of Stuffed Birds, you may admire his outward very self--the semblance of the Owl he was when he used to eye the moon shining over the Northern Sea:--but if you would see the noble and beautiful Creature himself, in all his living glory, you must seek him through the long summer twilight among the Orkney or the Shetland Isles. The Snowy Owl dearly loves the snow--and there is, we believe, a tradition among them, that their first ancestor and ancestress rose up together from a melting snow-wreath on the very last day of a Greenland winter, when all at once the bright fields reappear. The race still inhabits that frozen coast--being common, indeed, through all the regions of the Arctic Circle. It is numerous on the shores of Hudson's Bay, in Norway, Sweden, and Lapland--but in the temperate parts of Europe and America "rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno."

We defy all the tailors on the face of the habitable globe; and what countless cross-legged fractional parts of men--who, like the beings of whom they are constituents, are thought to double their numbers every thirty years--must not the four quarters of the earth, in their present advanced state of civilisation, contain!--we defy, we say, all the tailors on the face of the habitable globe to construct such a surtout as that of the Snowy Owl, covering him, with equal luxury and comfort, in summer's heat and winter's cold. The elements, in all their freezing fury, cannot reach the body of the bird through that beautiful down-mail. Well guarded are the opening of those great eyes. Neither the driving dust, nor the searching sleet, nor the sharp frozen snow-stour, give him the ophthalmia. Gutta Serena is to him unknown--no Snowy Owl was ever couched for cataract--no need has he for an oculist, should he live an hundred years; and were they to attempt any operation on his lens or iris, how he would hoot at Alexander and Wardrope!

Night, doubtless, is the usual season of his prey; but he does not shun the day, and is sometimes seen hovering unhurt in the sunshine. The red or black grouse flies as if pursued by a ghost; but the Snowy Owl, little slower than the eagle, in dreadful silence overtakes his flight, and then death is sudden and sure. Hawking is, or was, a noble pastime--and we have now prevented our eyes from glancing at Jer-falcon, Peregrine, or Goshawk; but Owling, we do not doubt, would be noways inferior sport; and were it to become prevalent in modern times, as Hawking was in times of old, why, each lady, as Venus already fair, with an Owl on her wrist, would look as wise as Minerva.

But our soul sickens at all those dreams of blood! and fain would turn away from fierce eye, cruel beak, and tearing talon--war-weapons of them that delight in wounds and death--to the contemplation of creatures whose characteristics are the love of solitude--shy gentleness of manner--the tender devotion of mutual attachment--and, in field or forest, a lifelong passion for peace.