CHRISTOPHER IN HIS SPORTING JACKET 



to his grave. He was buried — not by our hands, but 

 by the hands of one whose tender and manly heart 

 loved the old, blind, deaf, staggering creature to the 

 very last — for such in his fourteenth year he truly 

 was — a sad and sorry sight to see, to them who re- 

 membered the glory of his stately and majestic years. 

 One day he crawled with a moan-like whine to our 

 brother's feet, and expired. Reader, young, bright, 

 and beautiful though thou be — remember all flesh is 

 dust! 



This is an episode — a tale, in itself complete, yet 

 growing out of, and appertaining to, the main plot of 

 Epic or Article. You will recollect we were speaking 

 of ducks, teals, and widgeons — and we come now to 

 the next clause of the verse — wild geese and swans. 



Some people's geese are all swans; but so far from 

 that being the case with ours — sad and sorry are we 

 to say it — now all our swans are geese. But in our 

 buoyant boyhood, all God's creatures were to our eyes 

 just as God made them; and there was ever — espe- 

 cially birds — a tinge of beauty over them all. What 

 an inconceivable difference — distance — to the imagi- 

 nation, between the nature of a tame and a wild 

 goose! Aloft in heaven, themselves in night invisible, 

 the gabble of a cloud of wild geese is sublime. Whence 

 comes it — whither goes it — for what end, and by what 

 power impelled .f^ Reason sees not into the darkness of 

 [86] 



