MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 7 



He has a finer taste in fruit than could be distilled from 

 many successive committees of the Horticultural Society, 

 and he eats with a relishing gulp not inferior to Dr. Johnson s. 

 He feels and freely exercises his right of eminent domain. 

 His is the earliest mess of green peas ; his all the mulberries 

 I had fancied mine. But if he gets also the lion s share of 

 the raspberries, he is a great planter, and sows those wild 

 ones in the woods that solace the pedestrian and give a mo 

 mentary calm even to the jaded victims of the White Hills. 

 He keeps a strict eye over one s fruit, and knows to a shade 

 of purple when your grapes have cooked long enough in the 

 sun. During the severe drought a few years ago, the robins 

 wholly vanished from my garden. I neither saw nor heard 

 one for three weeks. Meanwhile a small foreign grape-vine, 

 rather shy of bearing, seemed to find the dusty air congenial, 

 and, dreaming perhaps of its sweet Argos across the sea, 

 decked itself with a score or so of fair bunches. I watched 

 them from day to day till they should have secreted sugar 

 enough from the sunbeams, and at last made up my mind 

 that I would celebrate my vintage the next morning. But 

 the robins too had somehow kept note of them. They must 

 have sent out spies, as did the Jews into the promised land, 

 before I was stirring. When I went with my basket, at least 

 a dozen of these winged vintagers bustled out from among 

 the leaves, and alighting on the nearest trees interchanged 

 some shrill remarks about me of a derogatory nature. They 

 had fairly sacked the vine. Not Wellington s veterans made 

 cleaner work of a Spanish town ; not Federals or Confede 

 rates were ever more impartial in the confiscation of neutral 

 chickens. I was keeping my grapes a secret to surprise the 

 fair Fidele with, but the robins made them a profounder 

 secret to her than I had meant. The tattered remnant of a 

 single bunch was all my harvest-home. How paltry it looked 

 at the bottom of my basket, as if a humming-bird had laid 

 her egg in an eagle s nest ! I could not help laughing ; and 

 the robins seemed to join heartily in the merriment. There 

 was a native grape-vine close by, blue with its less refined 

 abundance, but my cunning thieves preferred the foreign 

 flavour. Could I tax them with want of taste ? 



The robins are not good solo singers, but their chorus, 

 as, like primitive fire-worshippers, they hail the return of 

 light and warmth to the world, is unrivalled. There are a 



