MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 3 



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 tortoise might 

 have been a member of the Royal Society, if he could have 

 condescended to so ignoble an ambition. It had but just 

 been discovered that a surface inclined at -a certain angle 

 with the plane of the horizon took more of the sun s rays. 

 The tortoise had always known this (though he unostenta 

 tiously made no parade of it), and used accordingly to tilt 

 himself up against the garden- wall in the autumn. He 

 seems to have been more of a philosopher than even Mr. 

 White himself, caring for nothing but to get under a cabbage- 

 leaf when it rained, or the sun was too hot, and to bury him 

 self alive before frost a four-footed Diogenes, who carried 

 his tub on his back. 



There are moods in which this kind of history is infinitely 

 refreshing. These creatures whom we affect to look down 

 upon as tne drudges of instinct are members of a common 

 wealth whose constitution rests on immovable bases. Never 

 any need of reconstruction there ! They never dream of 

 settling it by vote that eight hours are equal to ten, or that 

 one creature is as clever as another and no more. They do 

 not use their poor wits in regulating God s clocks, nor think 

 they cannot go astray so long as they carry their guide-board 

 about with them a delusion we often practise upon our 

 selves with our high and mighty reason, that admirable 

 finger-post which points every way and always right. It isv 

 good for us now and then to converse with a world like Mr.l 

 White s, where Man is the least important of animals. But v 

 one who, like me, has always lived in the country and always 

 on the same spot, is drawn to his book by other occult sym 

 pathies. Do we not share his indignation at that stupid 

 Martin who had graduated his thermometer no lower than 

 4 above zero of Fahrenheit, so that in the coldest weather 

 ever known the mercury basely absconded into the bulb, 

 and left us to see the victory slip through our fingers just as 

 they were closing upon it? No man, I suspect, ever lived 

 long in the country without being bitten by these meteoro 

 logical ambitions. He likes to be hotter and colder, to have 

 been more deeply snowed up, to have more trees and larger 

 blown down than his neighbours. With us descendants of 



B 2 



