ranspired that the Frau ate her feathered persecutors, the
patience of the villagers refused to honour the new demand upon it:
she was at once arrested, and charged with prostituting a noble
superstition to a base selfish end. We will pass over the trial;
suffice it she was convicted. But even then they had not the heart to
burn a middle-aged woman, with full rounded outlines, as a witch, so
they broke her upon the wheel as a thief.

[Illustration]

The reckless antipathy of the domestic fowls to this inoffensive lady
remains to be explained. Having rejected her theory, I am bound in
honour to set up one of my own. Happily an inventory of her effects,
now before me, furnishes a tolerably safe basis. Amongst the articles
of personal property I note "One long, thin, silken fishing line, and
hook." Now if I were a barn-yard fowl--say a goose--and a lady not a
friend of mine were to pass me, munching sweetmeats, and were to drop
a nice fat worm, passing on apparently unconscious of her loss, I
think I should try to get away with that worm. And if after swallowing
it I felt drawn towards that lady by a strong personal attachment, I
suppose that I should yield if I could not help it. And then if the
lady chose to run and I chose to follow, making a good deal of noise,
I suppose it would look as if I were engaged in a very reprehensible
pursuit, would it not? With the light I have, that is the way in
which the case presents itself to my intelligence; though, of course,
I may be wrong.

* * * * *

THE CIVIL SERVICE IN FLORIDA.

Colonel Bulper was of a slumberous turn. Most people are not: they
work all day and sleep all night--are always in one or the other
condition of unrest, and never slumber. Such persons, the Colonel used
to remark, are fit only for sentry duty; they are good to watch our
property while we take our rest--and they take the property. But this
tale is not of them; it is of Colonel Bulper.

There was a fellow named Halsey, a practical joker, and one of the
most disagreeable of his class. He would remain broad awake for a year
at a time, for no other purpose than to break other people of their
natural rest. And I must admit that from the wreck of his faculties
upon the rock of _insomnia_ he had somehow rescued a marvellous
ingenuity and fertility of expedient. But this tale is not so much of
him as of Colonel Bulper.

At the time of which I write, the Colonel was