ses of Rome,
while here the world has no entrance. No rumor of the revolt of the
American Colonies seems to have reached him. "The natural term of an
hog's life" has more interest for him than that of an empire. Burgoyne
may surrender and welcome; of what consequence is _that_ compared with
the fact that we can explain the odd tumbling of rooks in the air
by their turning over "to scratch themselves with one claw"? All the
couriers in Europe spurring rowel-deep make no stir in Mr. White's
little Chartreuse;(1) but the arrival of the house-martin a day earlier
or later than last year is a piece of news worth sending express to all
his correspondents.

(1) _La Grande Chartreuse_ was the original Carthusian monastery in
France, where the most austere privacy was maintained.

Another secret charm of this book is its inadvertent humor, so
much the more delicious because unsuspected by the author. How pleasant
is his innocent vanity in adding to the list of the British, and
still more of the Selbornian, _fauna!_ I believe he would gladly have
consented to be eaten by a tiger or a crocodile, if by that means
the occasional presence within the parish limits of either of these
anthropophagous brutes could have been established. He brags of no
fine society, but is plainly a little elated by "having considerable
acquaintance with a tame brown owl." Most of us have known our share
of owls, but few can boast of intimacy with a feathered one. The great
events of Mr. White's life, too, have that disproportionate importance
which is always humorous. To think of his hands having actually been
though worthy (as neither Willoughby's nor Ray's were) to hold a stilted
plover, the _Charadrius himaniopus,_ with no back toe, and therefore
"liable, in speculation, to perpetual vacillations"! I wonder, by
the way, if metaphysicians have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the
acquaintance in Sussex of "an old family tortoise," which had then been
domesticated for thirty years. It is clear that he fell in love with it
at first sight. We have no means of tracing the growth of his passion;
but in 1780 we find him eloping with its object in a post-chaise. "The
rattle and hurry of the journey so perfectly roused it that, when I
turned it out in a border, it walked twice down to the bottom of my
garden." It reads like a Court Journal: "Yesterday morning H.R.H. the
Princess Alice took an airing of half an hour on the terrace of Windsor
Castle." This torto