bin'!" rabbiter.

"Can you?" replies the accurately, for he did not keep straight. "Do you cop me your dab- lines, like a setter, but still rarely going ber.' The " dabber," an implement twice over the same ground. We apwith a spade at one end and a spike at proached slowly, for if a hedgehog is the other, is "copped," and dexter- not disturbed by a heavy footfall or a ously caught. "Do you fudge him a sudden movement, it simply disregards bit," urges the rabbiter; and the bailiff men. To and fro he went, poking his "fudges" vigorously. Then the ferret long snout into every hoof-mark, and is withdrawn. "Lor' bless me, if I routing among the oak leaves. He hain't been a-fudging the ferret!" he seemed to find little, and to be very exclaims; and the ill-used and gasp-hungry. Once or twice he put up his ing ferret is exhibited. "Oh, ah!" head and sniffed, and stared at the says the rabbiter, "we'd best go back, figure above him; but as it did not I reckon." And the pair wind up nets move, he went on searching for a supand bags, and splash home through the per. As he passed, we touched him a mud. They are almost the last to leave tergo with the gun-barrel. He whisked the open fields, and as we enter the round with prickles up, looking angry high wood the sounds of daily human and quite at a loss to understand what labor die with the waning light-when had happened. He then examined the the plough-teams, with looped-up splin- boots, and tried to climb the leg above, ter-bars banging against the trace- but could not get a foothold for his chains, plod homewards to the stables. hind feet. Down again to the boots. The grey light wanes and the wind The blacking smelt nice, so he gnawed rises, angry and sighing in the tree- at them steadily, with far more force tops. A wide avenue of Scotch firs than might be expected from so small runs down the length of the wood. The a hedgehog -for he was not larger ride is still strewn thick with acorns, than a cocoanut. Having tasted one for this has been the most prolific year boot, he then tried the other, and did ever known for the seeds of trees; the not take alarm till he was suddenly husks are already splitting here and picked up. Then for a minute he there, and the red shoots are sprouting closed his eyes, and rolled into a ball. from the pointed end; but many are A curious change of expression takes mere crackling shells nibbled by squir- place when the hedgehog draws his rels and mice. The wood-pigeons have heavy eyebrows down. At other times been feasting for weeks, pheasants his face is impudent and rather savage. have helped them, sacksfull have been Then he looks meek and gentle, a nice carried home by the woodman to grind little fellow, who eats bread and milk, and mix with bran for the sheep, and and is regarded as a pet for children. pigs have forced their way through the Unrolled, he is his true self, -a creafences to munch their fill, yet the quan- ture that kills adders, drives the partity on the ground seems now as great tridge from her nest, and eats the as ever. In the ride we meet a hedge- eggs; a sturdy, omnivorous little anihog, almost the last creature to be mal, afraid of few things, except a expected on such a chilly day. Gener- badger. He had not been held a minally piggy spends the winter coiled up ute before he began to uncurl, wriggled in a bed of leaves in a rabbit-burrow, over on his back, gave the nearest under a root, or in the centre of a thick finger a bite which reached through a bush, and sleeps till spring comes. buckskin glove, dropped on to the ride, Perhaps this hedgehog has been idle and scuffled away among the brambles. in the summer, and not laid up a By this time it was almost dusk, and store of fat to last him through the the pigeons were arriving in small winter; so he was awake, and obliged flocks, and settling into the fir-tops in to forage. He was hunting eagerly, different parts of the wood. Each flock taking half the width of the ride, and circled high overhead twice or thrice quartering it to and fro, not very before alighting. The fieldfares fol

lowed, squeaking and chattering from toll to the gun, as they fly low and tree to tree, and the cock-pheasants sleepy and bewildered over the pinewent up to roost one by one, telling the tops. There is hardly a better bird for whole wood about it. Small woodland the table, outside the list of true game birds feed till dark in these short win- birds, than these plump Christmas ter days, and a whole flock of tits and wood-pigeons after months of plenty bullfinches were climbing and flitting and open weather. Even when the among the ash-poles, eager to use the lingering twilight has almost gone, and last minutes of twilight. A pair of the bright planets shine with eager sparrow-hawks were anxious to make eyes through the lacing oak boughs, their supper on the tits, and their while "echo bids good-night from silent, gliding forms crossed and re- every glade," the wood is not yet crossed among the stems from minute silent. The grey crows have come to minute, winding among the closely from the North to tell us that it is growing ash-poles with astonishing Christmas. They have crossed the powers of steering in full flight. So North Sea, and skirted the shore southquick were their movements, and so ward from estuary to estuary, past the close to the stems, that though the bold mouths of the Fen rivers and the birds took no alarm at the motionless marshes of the Broads, and arrived, as human figure, it was almost impossible they always do, in the last week of the to fire a shot at these worst poachers of old year, to croak their warning tale the wood, with any certainty of killing. into the winter night. They had carried off more than one of the tits when a third hawk swept over the wood, seized a small bird in its claws, and sailed off up the ride. A shot and a red shower of sparks was followed by the fall of the hawk, and the clatter of a hundred pairs of wings as the pigeons left the trees. The hawk was dead, with the finch still in its claws, apparently unhurt. In a few minutes the wood is quiet again, and the pigeons return, and during the last few minutes before dark, pay heavy

I sent forth memory in heedful guise,

To search the record of preceding years; Back, like the raven to the ark she flies, And croaks disaster to my trembling

ears,

the poet writes. The cry of the grey crows, like the voice of the raven, has an evil sound. But they have croaked in the wood at each year's ending, and if the next be no worse than those which have gone, we shall not cease to enjoy the sounds of the winter wood at sundown.

MOTHER-OF-PEARL. The most beauti- method of treating such shells consists in ful mother-of-pearl, unless that of the drawing upon them with a brush and wax obalone be excepted, is obtained from the varnish any designs desired, after which nautilus, which is a cephelon and related they are placed in a bath of weak acid. to the cuttlefish. Occupying only the The latter eats away the outer coat whermouth of its dwelling, the latter is com- ever it is not protected by the varnish, the posed of a series of empty chambers, each result being a lovely cameo with raised of which the animal has successively lived figures in white on a pearly ground. Nain and vacated as it grew bigger, building ture, however, beats art hollow at this sort up behind it at each move a wall of purest of work. In the Cretaceous epoch, hunpearl. These vacant rooms of pearl are all dreds of thousands of years ago, there connected by a pneumatic tube, which en-lived certain cephalopods, since extinct, ables the creature to so control the air sup- which science calls "ammonites." The ply in its house as to make the domicile lighter or heavier at will, in order to ascend or descend in the water. The shell is too thin to bear grinding, and so muriatic acid is used to remove the outer coat and disclose the exquisite nacre beneath.

A

pearl they produced was of wonderful beauty, and many fossil ammonites dug up to-day have been so operated upon by the process of decay as to form elaborate patterns on the shells in pearl and white.

English Mechanic.

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Ere the heart's springs are slow and run- Forgetting, while the bright hours go,

From The Nineteenth Century.
PROFESSOR TYNDALL.

BY PROFESSOR HUXLEY.

among men of mental constitutions diverse in everything but strength of will, nor, indeed, any power short of almighty Death, has been able to sunder them from that time to this. And among those friends who, as the years rolled on,

mir so oft

66

PERSONAL, like national, history has its epochs; brief seasons, during which life is fuller than usual, and the present is more obviously pregnant with the future than at other times. For me, the year 1851 constitutes such an In Noth und Trübsal beigestanden, epoch. In November, 1850, I had re- to whom, indeed, I have found the old turned to England after an absence, shikaree's definition of a friend, as a which not only extended over a consid- man with whom you can go tiger-hunterable period of time, but covered the ing," strictly applicable, almost the critical age of transition from adoles-earliest was John Tyndall. cence to full manhood. In the course My elder by some five years, Tynof these four years, largely spent in dall's very marked and vigorous perlittle-explored regions of the other side sonality must have long taken its final of the globe, I had been in the world as set when we foregathered in 1851. well as round it, and stored up varied The dyer's hand is subdued to that it experiences of things and men. More- works in; and, it may be, that much over, I had done some bits of scientific occupation with types of structure, work which, as I was pleasantly sur- elsewhere, is responsible for a habit of prised to learn on my return, were bet-classifying men to which I was, and ter thought of than I had, I will not am, given. But I found my new friend say expected, but ventured to hope, a difficult subject — incertæ sedis, as the when I sent them home; and they pro- naturalists say; in other words, hard vided me with an introduction to the to get into any of my pigeon-holes. scientific society of London. I found Before one knew him well, it seemed the new world, into which I thus sud- possible to give an exhaustive definidenly dropped, extremely interesting, tion of him in a string of epigrammatic and its inhabitants kindly disposed antitheses, such as those in which the towards the intruder. The veterans older historians delight to sum up were civil, the younger men cordial; the character of a king or leading and it speedily dawned upon my mind statesman. Impulsive vehemence was that I had found the right place for associated with a singular power of myself, if I could only contrive to stop self-control and a deep-seated reserve, in it. As time went on, I acted upon not easily penetrated. Free-handed this conviction; and, fortune greatly aiding effort, the end of it was thirty odd years of pretty hard toil, partly as an investigator and teacher in one branch of natural knowledge, and partly as a half - voluntary, half- compelled man-of-all-work for the scientific household in general.

generosity lay side by side with much tenacity of insistence on any right, small or great; intense self-respect and a somewhat stern independence, with a sympathetic geniality of manner, especially towards children, with whom Tyndall was always a great favorite. Flights of imaginative rhetoric, which amused (and sometimes amazed) more phlegmatic people, proceeded from a singularly clear and hard-headed reasoner, over-scrupulous, if that may be, about keeping within

But the year 1851 has other and even stronger claims to be counted an era in my existence. In the course of the twelve months after my return, I made acquaintances which rapidly ripened into friendships, knit with such strong the strictest limits of logical demonbonds of mutual affection and mutual respect, that neither the ordinary vicissitudes of life, nor those oppositions in theory and practice which will arise

Α

stration; and sincere to the core. bright and even playful companion, Tyndall had little of that quick appreciation of the humorous side of things in