68 A BOOK ABOUT THE GABDEN. 



Were not these provocations sufficient, think you, 

 to disturb even the placid spirit of a Grundy, and to 

 make sour within him the rich custards of his human 

 kindness? A mouse, we read, set the lion free ; and 

 a blackhird may rouse the British ditto, even as the 

 twopenny tin horn of the bird-tender may excite the 

 startled hunter, or speak to the charger of war. So 

 there he stood, erect in all the majesty of wrath, bold 

 as Ajax defying the lightning, and suggesting that he 

 should like a gun. 



And wherefore is Miss Susan mute ? Stands she 

 aghast, astonished, speechless, at the indelicate be- 

 haviour of the feathered tribe, or wherefore is she 

 dumb ? She loved those blackbirds well, and now she 

 wears the strangely piteous look of one hearing, for 

 the first time, harsh things of her beloved, and listen- 

 ing to the most respectable evidence that the joy of 

 her soul is a thief. There she stands, grandly indig- 

 nant, like the Lady Ida, when she found three men in 

 petticoats among her " sweet girl-graduates " : 



" A tide of fierce 



Invective seemed to wait behind her lips, 

 As waits a river, level with the dam, 

 Eeady to burst, and flood the world with foam." 



But Miss Susan keeps the flood-gates closed, and 

 without a word, the heart's stream too flush and deep 

 to ripple, she walks slowly, sternly to the house. 



But it is not the birds, my reader, who have caused 

 this sad dismay. It is " animal implume " it is 

 Joseph Grundy, for whom this stillness in the air 

 portends a thunder-storm. Two hours afterward it fell. 



