GEESE 201 



too, is the nobler figure ; but it is a very familiar 

 figure, and we have not forgotten the reason of its 

 presence among us. He satisfies a material want 

 only too generously, and on this account is too 

 much associated in the mind with mere flavours. 

 We keep a swan or a peacock for ornament ; a 

 goose for the table he is the Michaelmas and 

 Christmas bird. A somewhat similar debasement 

 has fallen on the sheep in Australia. To the man 

 in the bush he is nothing but a tallow- elaborating 

 organism, whose destiny it is to be cast, at maturity, 

 into the melting vat, and whose chief use it is to 

 lubricate the machinery of civilisation. It a little 

 shocks, and at the same time amuses, our Colonial 

 to find that great artists in the parent country 

 admire this most unpoetic beast, and waste their 

 time and talents in painting it. 



Some five or six years ago, in the Alpine Journal, 

 Sir Martin Conway gave a lively and amusing 

 account of his first meeting with A. D. M'Cormick, 

 the artist who subsequently accompanied him to 

 the Karakoram Himalayas. " A friend," he wrote, 

 " came to me bringing in his pocket a crumpled- 

 up water sketch or impression of a lot of geese. I 

 was struck by the breadth of the treatment, and I 

 remember saying that the man who could see such 



