THE SIX OF SPADES. 67 



tive care of that beautiful crystal bowl, which he 

 insists on carrying, to the intense terror of the whole 

 household, knowing, as we do, that rather than break 

 it, Joseph Grundy would prefer to be " set quick i' the 

 ' earth, and bowled to death with turnips." 



Only once, within my cognisance, has he been 

 seriously, nay sternly, censured; and this on the 

 occasion of an appeal which he addressed to Miss 

 Susan for the loan of a certain single-barrelled gun, 

 " to shoot them oudacious blackbirds." He affirmed 

 that they not only stole his fruit, but that, when he 

 drove them away, they just " popped on to the top of 

 the wall, and then turned round and sauced him." He 

 had invented scarecrows of such repulsive aspect as 

 would have scared, he was sure, any decent birds into 

 fits ; but those brutes had come back, " as imperent 

 as imperent." One effigy, that of a gentleman fully 

 armed with the artillery which Joseph desired to 

 realize, and threatening grim destruction to all around, 

 they had treated with conspicuous scorn, sitting upon 

 the fowling-piece, " disgesting," as Mr. Grundy said, 

 and using the entire creation as a kind of lounge, and 

 worse. So had they exceeded in effrontery those, 

 their naughty brothers, of whom we read in a delight- 

 ful modern biography * that when the ladies set 

 up an old packing-case, with a piece of red bunting 

 affixed thereto, as an object which could not fail to 

 dismay the winged banditti of the neighbourhood, 

 "they stood upon the box to eat the cherries, and 

 then wiped their beaks on the rag ! " 



* The Life of Patrick Fraser Tytler. 



