es of summer glory, and I stood by looking on dejectedly. The June
baby, who is two feet square and valiant beyond her size and years,
seized a stick much bigger than herself and went after the cows, the
cowherd being nowhere to be seen. She planted herself in front of them
brandishing her stick, and they stood in a row and stared at her in
great astonishment; and she kept them off until one of the men from
the farm arrived with a whip, and having found the cowherd sleeping
peacefully in the shade, gave him a sound beating. The cowherd is a
great hulking young man, much bigger than the man who beat him, but he
took his punishment as part of the day's work and made no remark of any
sort. It could not have hurt him much through his leather breeches, and
I think he deserved it; but it must be demoralising work for a
strong young man with no brains looking after cows. Nobody with less
imagination than a poet ought to take it up as a profession.

After the June baby and I had been welcomed back by the other two with
as many hugs as though we had been restored to them from great perils,
and while we were peacefully drinking tea under a beech tree, I happened
to look up into its mazy green, and there, on a branch quite close to my
head, sat a little baby owl. I got on the seat and caught it easily, for
it could not fly, and how it had reached the branch at all is a mystery.
It is a little round ball of gray fluff, with the quaintest, wisest,
solemn face. Poor thing! I ought to have let it go, but the temptation
to keep it until the Man of Wrath, at present on a journey, has seen it
was not to be resisted, as he has often said how much he would like to
have a young owl and try and tame it. So I put it into a roomy cage and
slung it up on a branch near where it had been sitting, and which cannot
be far from its nest and its mother. We had hardly subsided again to our
tea when I saw two more balls of fluff on the ground in the long grass
and scarcely distinguishable at a little distance from small mole-hills.
These were promptly united to their relation in the cage, and now when
the Man of Wrath comes home, not only shall he be welcomed by a wife
decked with the orthodox smiles, but by the three little longed-for
owls. Only it seems wicked to take them from their mother, and I know
that I shall let them go again some day--perhaps the very next time the
Man of Wrath goes on a journey. I put a small pot of water in the cage,
though