sc LATER STREET. 
115 
sin" in London, which shows tlieir bad taste, unless indeed a 
“ Dutch canary ” is another name for a gilded sparrow. The 
cages covering the walls of the houses like the gigantic fruit of a 
creeper resound with the rival concerts of linnets and genuine 
canaries trumpeting their own merits, and the grey parrots add 
their screech to tlie babel. On the other hand the green paro- 
quets are as dumb and solemn as any court of appeal. 
But on the whole London shops offer an interesting con- 
trast to those of Paris. The former are replete with singing 
birds, the latter with those of gay plumage, such as the 
ruddy Madagascar weaver-bird and the speckled .\madu\'ada, 
or else with those whose attire is quaint and striking, such as 
the Java sparrow. On the outside of one shop are pictures 
of wonderful animals which recall that delight of one’s child- 
hood — “ Ye Historye of Four-footed Beestes,” with accounts of 
the awful human-faced monsters, containing all the apocryphal 
stories that over-credulous travellers from Herodotus down to 
Marco Polo ever reported to a wondering public. In the road 
a plaintive old man timidly offers the passer-by a bunch of green 
rue, possibly because it is Sunday, for as that botanist, Ophelia, 
remarked — “ we may call it herb’-o’-grace o’ Sundays.” By his 
side and entirely eclipsing him, a brazen-voiced herbalist makes 
up mi.xtures of juniper-berries, sassafras and barberry bark as a 
remedy for all liver complaints. The street urchin, entirely 
ignorant of such afflictions, prefers to take long straws and tickle 
therewith the sixpenny tortoises in the shop window, whose 
battered shells suggest that they have seen a good deal of life 
and have very likely been used as missiles in the shopman’s 
family jars. 
While the small but exquisitely coloured zebra finches 
hop about in thorough enjoyment of the strife of tongues, and 
the tawny owl contentedly blinks and takes forty winks, the 
hoary old parrot in their neighbourhood swears in an undertone 
in language that must surely have been picked up on board 
ship, and the Chinese mocking-birds seem to be in a fever of 
excitement, bewildered it may be by the superabundance of 
material for mockery. High up on the wall the laughing 
jackass, now perverted into a melancholy and cynical philosopher, 
rouses himself from his dreams of Australian gum-trees, and 
looking down upon the heads of the charlatans seems on the 
point of startling the careless throng with his obstreperous “ hoo ! 
hoo ! ha ! ” but just as his throat begins to swell with the satire he 
realizes the full bitterness of the change from his luscious 
dreams to the sombre reality before him, and ends by making a 
vicious onslaught with his great fishing beak on the wires of 
the cage. Above all the chorus of hoarse shouts and cries rise 
the liquid trill of the chaffinch and the song of the irrepressible 
lark ; these, together with the cooing of doves, irresistibly call 
up before the mind’s eye those well-known green fields and 
woods where no Autolycus hawks his patent medicines. ^ 
W. A. Fox. 
