BOY PIGEON -KEEPERS. [CHAP. i. 



And then, the strange events necessarily occurring to 

 us. (The plural is used because no boy pigeon-keeper 

 looks after his birds without a companion or two.) The 

 severe countenance with which our neighbour and land- 

 lord, hitherto beaming with benignant smiles, now 

 greeted us as we were walking over the tiles of the 

 outhouses in pursuit of an old " Duffer " with a 

 clipped wing ; the astonishment of a respectable shoe- 

 maker on the other side of the street, to see a boy's 

 face peeping over the ridge of the opposite roof, with 

 the air of Cortes surveying the Pacific Ocean from the 

 summit of the Andes, rather than with the conscious- 

 ness of being the mischievous urchin that he was ; the 

 arrival of a strange Pigeon with a sore and naked 

 breast ; the bold resolve to use decisive surgery, and to 

 decapitate it, lest the evil should prove contagious ; the 

 trepidation of the maid who held the body, while we 

 secured the head and wielded the fatal chopper ; the 

 universal horror that the body should flap, and flutter, 

 and palpitate for a while after the operation was com- 

 plete ; the enigmatical illustration from English his- 

 tory, " King Charles walked and talked ; half an hour 

 after, his head was off," uttered without proper pause 

 at the semicolon or comma these, and a whole chro- 

 nicle full of such-like accidents, soon showed us that 

 life, to the young, is an onward journey through an 

 unexplored country, every step in which leads to some 

 discovery, and opens to us a pleasant or a repulsive 

 prospect. In maturer age, pitfalls, famishing deserts, 

 and entangled wildernesses, or the flattering and de- 

 ceptive mirage, showing signs of refreshing waters 

 where drought alone exists, may await our advancing 

 footsteps ; or it may be our better fate to progress 



