168 
BIRDS IN A VILLAGE. 
ing Jew," as an irreverent Quarterly Reviewer has 
called it — will lose its immortality, and the spry 
rotifer will fall a victim to the fine bright arrows 
of the chase. A strange quarry for men whose 
progenitors hunted the woolly mastodon and many- 
horned rhinoceros and sabre-toothed tiger ! 
That sad day of very small things for the sports- 
man is, however, not near, nor within measurable 
distance ; or, so it seemed to me when, an hour 
ago, I strolled round the garden, curiously peering 
into every shrub, to find the visible and compara- 
tively noble insect-life in great abundance. Beetles 
were there — hard, round, polished, and of various 
colours, like sea-worn pebbles on the beach; and 
some, called lady-birds in the vernacular, were 
bound like books in black and red. And the small 
gilded fly, not less an insect light-headed, a votary 
of vain delights, than in the prehistoric days when 
a white-headed old king, crazed and discrowned, 
railed against sweet Nature's liberty. And ever 
waiting to welcome this inconstant lover (with 
falces), there sits the solitary geometric spider, an 
image and embodiment of patience, not on a monu- 
ment, but a suspended wheel of which he is him- 
self the hub ; and so delicately fashioned are the 
silver spokes thereof, radiating from his round and 
gem-like body, and the rings, concentric tire within 
tire, that its exceeding fineness, like swift re- 
