A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW. 221 



This attitude he hardly changed during the two hours 

 we sat there. How serious and concerned he looked, 

 and how surprising that hearty, soliloquizing sort of 

 laugh which now and then came from him as he 

 talked, not so much a laugh provoked by anything 

 humorous in the conversation, as a sort of foil to his 

 thoughts, as one might say, after a severe judgment, 

 " Ah, well-a-day, what matters it ! " If that laugh 

 could have been put in his Latter-day Pamphlets, 

 where it would naturally come, or in his later political 

 tracts, these publications would have given much less 

 offense. But there was amusement in his laugh when 

 I told him we had introduced the English sparrow iu 

 America. " Introduced ! " he repeated, and laughed 

 again. He spoke of the bird as a " comical little 

 wretch," and feared we would regret the " introduc- 

 tion." He repeated an Arab proverb which says Solo- 

 mon's Temple was built amid the chirping of ten 

 thousand sparrows, and applied it very humorously in 

 the course of his talk to the human sparrows that al- 

 ways stand ready to chirrup and cackle down every 

 great undertaking. He had seen a cat walk slowly 

 along the top of a fence while a row of sparrows 

 seated upon a ridge-board near by all pointed at her 

 and chattered and scolded, and by unanimous vote 

 pronounced her this and that, but the cat went on 

 her way all the same. The verdict of majorities was 

 not always very formidable, however unanimous. 



A monument had recently been erected to Scott 

 iu Edinburgh, and he had been asked to take part in 



