Opposing Instincts. 43 



top are spreading out into a lovely crown of pinky 

 purple. The arrangement is one of the most exquisite 

 in nature, illustrating beauty long drawn out. First, 

 we have a true obelisk, the upper tiers yet immature, 

 and small and darker in colour altogether, without that 

 transparency and luminousness which marked those 

 below, but lending a wonderful grace, poise, and charm 

 to the flower and its movements. Then tier by tier in 

 series, step by step, the colour and charm are taken up 

 from those below, till at last all that remains is a kind 

 of glory-crown, over ranges of seeds : lovely foxgloves 



" In whose drooping bells the bee makes her sweet music." 



Almost behind me as I sit a mass of firewood has 

 been built stack-shape in view of winter. There a 

 discontented barn-door fowl has wandered from the 

 others and from her proper nest in the hen-house, and 

 has found a hole in this stack into which she has 

 managed to crawl, and has made a nest there, and 

 is now busy in laying her complement of eggs; but 

 with the inconsistency of her kind, in which apparently 

 opposite instincts maintain themselves in full force, she 

 has no sooner laid her egg than she exultantly informs 

 all the world of her feat, which she purposed to keep a 

 great secret. Her cluck, cluck, cluck, iack ! is shrill 

 and penetrating, no effort spared. What purpose can 

 that cackling serve, save to betray the hidden nest ? 

 Is the secretive instinct a faint survival even from 

 far-off ancestors, and the cackle a sort of vain, self- 

 conscious something, developed under domestication 

 and intercourse with man as it is certain now that 

 the bark of the dog is ? Wild gallinaceous fowls 

 do not cackle as does the domestic hen. The two 

 instincts seem totally opposed to each other, and are 



