A Vi TURE PLEA S URES. 
6 .) 
then a porpoise swims up with the tide; and its movement, well 
known on the sea, as a shoal passes across some bay, or round 
some headland, is apt to startle one as it passes close by your 
garden-door on a river. Once a seal came up ; but the beautiful 
creature was received with such discourtesy that it turned to go 
down again, was followed by its persecutors, rose close to a 
following boat, and was mercilessly shot. The porpoises had 
been persecuted in like manner ; but shot and rifle-balls seemed, 
fortunately, to have had no more effect on them than on an iron- 
clad, though a whole fleet of boats followed them on their 
course. In consequence of much public indignation, provoked 
b)’ the slaughter, the Conservators of the Thames had the de- 
stroyers of the seal punished ; but such ravages will not, it is to 
be feared, be checked unless the proper authorities make it 
widely known that such life is never to be wantonly destroyed. 
The swans furnish much interest. Always ready to take 
pieces of bread, they will, at high tides, take it out of my hand : 
and I have even got them to walk some way up the garden. At 
other times, they come down gently with their cygnets, the 
mother-bird nowand then bearing one of the family on her back, 
or again you may hear them making their peculiar utterances in 
flight as the}- pass along close to the surface of the water. But 
their most graceful attitude is when they slowly drift past, at 
eventide, into the glories of the sunset. Then they may well re- 
call the words in which they are addressed by the poet : — 
“ Day is dying ; float, O swan, along the niby river, 
Requiem chanting to the day ; day, the mighty giver. 
Pierced with shafts of time he bleeds, melted rubies sending 
Through the river and the sky, earth and heaven blending. 
All the long-drawn earthy banks, up to cloudland lifting 
Slow between them drifts the swan, ’twixt two heavens drifting. 
Wings half open, like a flower inly deeper flushing ; 
Neck and breast .as virgin’s pure, virgin proudly blushing.” 
At the river-end of the garden, in the coldest and shadiest 
place, some arctic moss brought for me in the Lusitania from 
Nova Zembla, had been planted, and seemed to be nicely grow- 
ing when, a month later, there came some very heavy Thames 
floods, which drowned many up-river houses from Eton to Kings- 
ton, and laid these pretty mosses for six weeks under water. 
The mention of swans brings up one of the most interesting 
kinds of life in the garden, its bird-life. In spring, the migrants 
find here their earliest way, and we often w-onder avhether a 
particular visitor, or a particular pair, may not have come to the 
same place several times, after spending the winter in Africa or 
some other distant region. From the bottom of the garden, we 
are pretty sure to see the first swallows hawking over the Thames 
for flies. And three times out of four, it is from across the river 
that we first hear its name sounded by that visitor whom Words- 
worth wondered whether he should .call a bird, or but a wander- 
ing voice. The favourite haunt of the cuckoo is among the trees 
