FOR YOUNG SELBORNIANS. 
213 
at Selbornian meetings, or, for that matter, may be sold there, 
for most children can now and then find a penny to spend, and 
they are not likely to find a better investment. 
One of these books contains an old friend. Eyes and no Eyes, 
and the story of The Three Giants, Ventosus, Aquafluens, and 
Vaporifer, who introduced an element of interest into the school 
reading-books of forty years ago, when such works were very 
different from the delightful volumes which now entice the pupil 
along the path of learning. Eyes and no Eyes, which was first 
published in Evenings at Home a great many years since, has 
more than once been recommended to us for reproduction in 
these pages. Children of many generations have read with 
interest, and some at least with profit, the account of the walk 
which Robert and William took one fine holiday. If we assume 
that two schoolboys would go for a walk alone, and that one 
was abnormally observant and the other phenomenally blind, 
there is nothing improbable in the narration : for the objects 
which so interested William are such as may be met with on an 
ordinary country walk. William could not resist the instinct 
which prompted him to capture a dragonfly, and it must be 
admitted that he “longed to catch ” a kingfisher; but this was 
before the days of the Selborne Society, and long before Robert 
would have been able to indulge in the cigarette which, for no 
very obvious reason, the artist has depicted him as smoking. 
We are indeed led to suppose by the pictures that Robert’s line 
of enjoyment lay in the direction of fine clothes ; his top hat, 
Eton jacket, walking-stick and gloves, contrast with William’s 
more sensible costume. Anyway, Air. Brinsley Le Fanu’s 
drawings add considerably to the attractiveness of the simple 
narrative, and help to enforce the lesson It conveys. 
What Eyes and No Eyes does for one side of Selbornian 
teaching, another old friend. The Story of the Robins, does for 
another. It can hardly be said that Mrs. Trimmer’s narrative 
suffers from abridgement, and it certainly gains by the addition 
of “new pictures on every page.” Mr. Stead’s preface so well 
describes the teaching of the little book, and the effect it may be 
expected to produce in the minds of thoughtful and sensitive 
lads, that we cannot do better than print it, almost in full : — 
Many, many years ago, when I was quite a little boy, before I left off petti- 
coats, if I remember aright, my dear father brought home one day The Story of 
the Robins. He had bought it for a penny or two at a second-hand bookstall, 
I believe, for we were all very poor in those days, and new books were not so 
cheap as they are to-day. It was a quaint old edition of Mrs. Trimmer’s story, 
with curious woodcuts illustrating the adventures of the Robin Family. What 
has become of that old brown-paper-covered little chapbook I do not know. But 
the reading of it, or rather the hearing it, as my father read it aloud to us children 
nearly half a century since, left a deep mark upon my mind which has influenced 
all niy life. A sense of the hateful cruelty of taking birds’ nests, a feeling that 
nothing was really so horribly wncked as injuring helpless, innocent, loving 
creatures for one’s pleasure, was worked by this story into the very depth of my 
inmost soul. From that day, the “ pulling” of a bird’s nest has always seemed 
to me one of the worst of crimes, an outrage upon the most sacred and the most 
