MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 3 



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 thought worthy (as neither Willoughby s nor 

 Bay s were) to hold a stilted plover, the Charadrius himan- 

 topus, with no back toe, and therefore &quot; liable, in speculation, 

 to perpetual vacillations ! &quot; I wonder, by the way, if meta 

 physicians have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the 

 acquaintance in Sussex of &quot; an old family tortoise,&quot; 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. &quot; The rattle 

 arid 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.&quot; It reads like a Court Journal : 

 &quot;Yesterday morning H.E/.H. the Princess Alice took an 

 airing of half-an-hour on the terrace of Windsor Castle.&quot; 

 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 unostentatiously 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 himself 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 the 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 



