Mr. Turveydrop and His Foreign Cousins 27 



teach a class, but with the Wax-wings, to whom 

 owls might go to school to their considerable 

 profit, this is all reversed, and the class teaches 

 the individual. Lady Clara, we have guessed your 

 secret; we know where you got that repose that 

 stamps the cast of Vere de Vere. To the Four 

 Hundred of New York, we send this challenge : in 

 a contest on Deportment, we will wager a hundred 

 to one, and enter four Wax-wings against your en- 

 tire bunch, and if you are not beaten, in addition 

 to the loss of our wager, we will throw Turvey- 

 drop et al. into bankruptcy. We are not afraid of 

 being beaten, for with the Wax-wings, deportment 

 is a fashion and a passion ; and if you must know 

 it, a trust that can never be dissolved, by any 

 court lower than the Supreme Court of the Uni- 

 verse. Long years afterward, when the boy had 

 grown to manhood, and had married and had a 

 boy of his own, during an Easter vacation, he 

 took him down to Mill's swamp in a search for 

 early spring Migrants, and the first birds tb be 

 encountered were a flock of twenty-one Wax- 

 wings, who are winter residents with us. They 

 were, as always, on dress parade, and quite as 

 bright and shining as the sun. Don't think me 

 sacrilegious if I say that it was Communion Sab- 

 bath with them, for I don't mean it in either a 

 religious or an irreligious way when I call atten- 

 tion to one of the most curious customs in the 



