IX 

 A GERMAN FIRST OF SEPTEMBER 



[Reprinted from Fraser's Magazine, September 1853.] 



Rain ! rain ! rain ! — nothing but rain ! All the 

 ditches full of water, and the partridges' eggs 

 hopelessly immersed 1 The poor draggled parent 

 pair, scrambling half-way up the hedge-bank, crouch- 

 ing among the dank rotting grass and brambles, 

 ruefully gazing at the wreck of their paternal and 

 maternal, and of our First September hopes ! Poor 

 little wee things, with bits of egg-shell sticking about 

 them, paddling along the plashy high-roads, squashed 

 by every fat farmer's gig and higgler's cart, their 

 parents' natural feelings too utterly washed out by 

 the eternal drizzle to make them take the trouble 

 of looking for an addled ant's egg or watery fly 

 (drowned, possibly, the week before last) for their 

 gaping and staggering offspring ; everything, in 

 short, rendering it a dead certainty that on the 

 next First we shall have nothing rising before us 

 but barren pairs or plufify cheepers. 



Such were the miseries reported to us by the 

 head-keeper, in a mingled state of grief and ale. 



