ork.--Comments on
American courtesies.--Farewell public appearances.

The warm affection which was so characteristic of my father toward people
was also directed, as I have already told, towards animals and birds. A
few further anecdotes occur to me, and I have ventured to give them here,
before proceeding to tell of his visit to America, his readings, and the,
to me, sad story of his last public appearance.

My father's quick and amusing observation of London birds and their
habits, and of their fondness for "low company," is full of charm and
quaint oddity. He writes: "That anything born of an egg and invested
with wings should have got to the pass that it hops contentedly down a
ladder into a cellar, and calls that going home, is a circumstance so
amazing as to leave one nothing more in this connection to wonder at. I
know a low fellow, originally of a good family from Dorking, who takes
his whole establishment of wives in single file in at the door of the jug
department of a disorderly tavern near the Haymarket, manoeuvres them
among the company's legs, and emerges with them at the bottle entrance,
seldom in the season going to bed before two in the morning. And thus he
passes his life. But the family I am best acquainted with reside in the
densest part of Bethnal Green. Their abstraction from the objects in
which they live, or rather their conviction that these objects have all
come into existence in express subservience to fowls, has so enchanted me
that I have made them the subject of many journeys at divers hours.
After careful observation of the two lords and of the ten ladies of whom
this family consists, I have come to the conclusion that their opinions
are represented by the leading lord and leading lady, the latter, as I
judge, an aged personage, afflicted with a paucity of feather and
visibility of quill that gives her the appearance of a bundle of office
pens. They look upon old shoes, wrecks of kettles, saucepans and
fragments of bonnets as a kind of meteoric discharge for fowls to peck
at. Gaslight comes quite as natural to them as any other light; and I
have more than a suspicion that in the minds of the two lords, the early
public house at the corner has superseded the sun. They always begin to
crow when the public house shutters begin to be taken down, and they
salute the pot-boy the instant he appears to perform that duty, as if he
were Phoebus in person."

During one of his walks through