THE CANADA GOOSE. 399 



wonted peregrinations through the country. But they remain in 

 unalterable alliance and friendship with five other Canadians, which, 

 with themselves, have undergone a similar process of losing part of 

 the wing, to prevent their departure from home. 



On my return from Italy, in the autumn of 1841, the keeper in- 

 formed me that, in the preceding spring, one of the little Bernacle 

 ganders, accompanied by an old Canadian goose, had come on the 

 island where the mansion stands, and formed a kind of nest on the 

 border of a flower-bed near the boat-house ; that the female had laid 

 five eggs in it ; and that all these eggs had turned out addle. I could 

 easily comprehend the latter part of his information relative to the 

 eggs : but had he told me that the income-tax is a blessing, and that 

 the national debt is an honour to the country, I could more readily 

 have believed him, than that a Canada goose had been fool enough 

 to unite herself with a Bernacle gander. Nevertheless, the man per- 

 sisted stoutly in what he had affirmed, and I told the story to others, 

 and nobody believed me. In the breeding season, however, of 1842, 

 this diminutive gander and magnificent goose appeared on the island ; 

 and as the spot which they had occupied on the preceding year was 

 very bleak and quite unsheltered, I thought that I could offer them a 

 more commodious situation. Just opposite the eastern windows of the 

 sitting-room, and two-and-twenty yards distant from them, there is yet 

 alive the remnant of a once superb and fertile blackheart cherry-tree. 

 It was evidently past its prime in the days of my early youth ; but I 

 can well remember that it then bore ponderous loads of dainty 

 cherries. This cherry-tree, like the hand that is now writing a de- 

 scription of it, appears the worse for wear ; and the wintry blasts of 

 more than half a century have too clearly proved that neither its 

 internal vigour, nor the strength of its gigantic limbs, could make an 

 effectual stand against the attacks of such sturdy antagonists. Its 

 north-western and north-eastern parts have gradually died away, and 

 what remains alive of it to the southward can no longer produce 

 fruit to be compared with that of gone-by periods. The bole, too, 

 which measures full ten feet and five inches in circumference at the 

 graft, seems to show signs of Time's hard usage. Perhaps in a few 

 years more a south-western gale, which often does much damage 

 here, may lay it low in ruins. Close to this venerable tree I made 



