168 
NATUEAL HISTORY OF SELBOENE. 
A neighbonring gentleman one summer had lost most of his chickens 
by a sparrow-hawk, that came gliding down between a faggot pile and 
the end of his house to the place where the coops stood. The owner, 
inwardly vexed to see his flock thus diminished, hung a setting-net 
adroitly between the pile and the house, into which the caitiff dashed, 
and was entangled. Eesentment suggested the law of retaliation ; he 
therefore clipped the hawk's wings, cut off his talons, and, fixing a 
cork on his bill, threw him down among the brood-hens. Imagination 
cannot paint the scene that ensued ; the expressions that fear, rage, 
and revenge, inspired, were new, or at least such as had been unnoticed 
before : the exasperated matrons upbraided, they execrated, they 
insulted, they triumphed. In a word, they never desisted from 
buffeting their adversary till they had torn him in an hundred pieces. 
LETTEE XLIV. 
TO THE SAME. 
" Monstrent 
j * * * * * 
( Quid tantum Oceano properent se tingere soles 
i Hyberni ; vel quae tardis mora noctibus obstet.'"' 
Selboene. 
Gentlemen who have outlets might contrive to make ornament 
subservient to utility : a pleasing eye-trap might also contribute to 
promote science : an obelisk in a garden or park might be both an 
embellishment and an heliotrope. 
Any person that is curious, and enjoys the advantage of a good 
horizon, might, with little trouble, make two heliotropes ; the one for 
the winter, the other for the summer solstice ; and the two erections 
might be constructed with very little expense ; for two pieces of timber 
frame-work, about ten or twelve feet high, and four feet broad at the 
base, and close lined with plank, would answer the purpose. 
The erection for the former should, if possible, be placed within sight 
of some window in the common sitting-parlour; because men, at that 
dead season of the year, are usually within doors at the close of the day ; 
while that for the latter might be fixed for any given spot in the garden 
or outlet : whence the owner might contemplate, in a fine summer's 
evening, the utmost extent that the sun makes to the northward at the 
season of the longest days. Now nothing would be necessary but to 
place these two objects with so much exactness, that the westerly limb 
of the sun, at setting, might but just clear the winter heliotrope to the 
west of it on the shortest day ; and that the whole disc of the sun, at 
the longest day, might exactly at setting also clear the summer 
heliotrope to the north of it. 
By this simple expedient it would soon appear that there is no such 
thing, strictly speaking, as a solstice ; for, from the shortest day, the 
owner would, every clear evening, see the disc advancing, at its setting, 
to the westward of the object ; and^ from the longest day, observe the 
