Ah 
permitted togo at large. ‘They are all tethered and 
_fed:and they are as unacquainted with grass as 
Smollett’s sage, whose antipathy to the country made 
him faint when he saw a cauliflower... That wor- — 
thy’s little familiarity with grain compelled him, in 
the face of a whole company to confess a plate of 
hominy to be the best rice-pudding he had ever ate. 
He however affected this delicacy to hide the fact 
that he was the son of a cottager, was born under 
a hedge, and had many years run wild among asses 
ona common. Our Port Royal goats really know 
nothing of green-fields, but by the patches of ver- 
dure they see on the far-off mountains. When you 
wonder by what means they acquire flesh, and make 
milk for the household, precious at just a penny- 
half penny for a thimbleful, you will discover that 
they are fed on all sorts of vegetable odds and ends. 
A tin-pan of tamarind husks, affords them little 
bits of mumbling, like Shakespeare’s remainder bis- 
cuit after a voyage. ‘The story goes that two mid- 
dies going along, drew up at a knot of sleek-looking 
goats in the street. Bless me, exclaimed the new- 
comer, how do these animals live; there is not a 
blade of grass to be seen in Port Royal. Oh, says 
the old stager, Vil tell you how it is; they put on 
them a pair of green spectacles, and set before them 
a bundle of shavings from the Dock-yard, and it 
_ passes with them for grass. This is simply a plea- 
sant absurdity, but Pennant refers us to a fact on 
the authority I think of Nicholas Hasselgreen in the 
Ameenitates Academice, which sounds not less 
