ill lie,
expecting the Last Trump. The robins are not kinder to the "friendless
bodies of unburied men" than are children to the bodies of mice and
birds. Here the ghost of no creature haunts reproaching us with the
absence of a tomb, as the dead sailor washed up on an alien shore
reproaches us so often in the pages of _The Greek Anthology_. There is
a procession to the grave and all due ceremony. There is even a
funeral service. Over the starling, perhaps, it lacked something in
appropriateness. The buriers meant well however. Their favourite in
verse at the time was _Lars Porsena of Clusium_, and they gave the
starling the best they knew--gave it to him from beginning to end.
What he made of it, there is no telling: he is, it is said an
impressionable bird, though something of a satirist. Someone,
overhearing them, recommended a briefer and more fitting service for
the future. The young thrush had the benefit of the advice. He was
laid to his last rest with the recitation of that noblest of
valedictories: "Fear no more the heat o' the sun," over his tomb. He
is now gone where there is no cat or parent to disturb. The priests
who buried him declare that he has been turned into a golden
nightingale, and that there must be no noise or romping in the garden
for three days, as not till then will he have arrived safely at the
Appleiades. That is the name they give to the Pleiades--the seven
golden islands whither pass the souls of dead mice and birds and dolls
and where Scarlatti lives and where you, too, may expect to go if you
please them. Even the black cat will probably go there--one's own
black cat. But not the neighbour's cat--the reddish-brown one--thief,
murderer and beast. It is the neighbour's cat that makes one believe
there is a hell.

Short is the memory of man, however. Shorter the memory of children.
There is no gloom that can withstand May pouring itself out in the
deep blue of anchusa and the paler blue of lupin, gushing out in the
yellow of laburnum, tossing like the tides in the wind. One is gloomy,
perhaps, when one looks at the lettuces and sees how slow is their
growth. Watching a plant grow is like watching a kettle boil. It seems
to take