from the French invader and the irrepressible Beales. The nervous
householder sleeps in his bed with a greater sense of security after
reading of the awful havoc which Captain A. and the Earl of B. are
making of the feathery tribe. In the accuracy of their aim he sees a
guarantee of order, and of the maintenance of his glorious Constitution.
Foreign menace and internal discord lose something of their terrors for
him as often as his eyes light upon the significant little paragraph to
which we have referred. Here is an item of intelligence for the haughty
Prussian and the dashing Zouave to ponder. Here is something for the
mole-like Fenian and the blatant Leaguesman to put in their pipes and
smoke.

The fate of the pigeons awaits all who would violate our shores, or
light up the flame of sedition in the land. If, as some philosophers
aver, the pigeon does not all die, but in some tranquil limbo flutters
on in an eternity of innocent cooing, it must console the poor bird to
reflect that, however cheap he may be held, he has not perished
altogether in vain. To serve a useful purpose is the great economy of
things, to point a warning, at the cost of one's heart's blood, to
England's foes and traitors--to the plotter in Munster as well as the
safer conspirator of the Parks--might content even a greater ambition
than that which animates the gentle bosom of a fantail.

But suppose some vindictive pouter to survive his less lucky comrades,
and, escaping among the birds who are duly chronicled as "getting away,"
to perch, full of resentment at the probable extinction of his species,
in the fashionable quarter of London. He would there witness a grand act
of retaliation. He would learn how Belgravia avenges Hornsey and
Shepherd's Bush. He would see the very men from whom his relatives had
received their quietus flying to their clubs for shelter, and calling on
their goddesses of the _demi-monde_ to cover them. He would perceive, by
an unerring instinct, that a contest was afoot in which the conditions
of that suburban sweepstakes at which he had involuntarily assisted were
exactly reversed. He would see those self-same sportsmen converted into
the target, the flutterers of the dovecot themselves in a flutter. And
he would be more than pigeon if he could repress a thrill of savage glee
at the spectacle of the enemies of his race realizing by experience all
the difference between shooting and being shot at.

Suppose, further, that