MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 3 



a stilted plover, the Charadrius himantopus, with no back 

 toe, and therefore " liable, in speculation, to perpetual 

 vacillations " ! I wonder, by the way, if metaphysicians 

 have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the acquaintance 

 in Sussex of " an old family tortoise," 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 1 780 we find 

 him eloping with its object in a post-chaise. " The rattle 

 and 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." 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 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 infi- 

 nitely refreshing. These creatures whom we affect to 

 look down upon as the drudges of instinct are members 

 of a commonwealth whose constitution rests on immov- 

 able 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 an- 

 other and no more. They do not use their poor wits in 



