35 
THE SELBORNIAN PARSON FROM WITHIN. 
HEN the Selbornian is located at the parsonage, it is 
his fault if he is not able to diffuse the Selbornian 
atmosphere a little further than is possible to his lay 
brother. To begin with he has free access (at present) 
to the National School. In this case he gives a weekly object- 
lesson to the upper standards all the year round, choosing his 
subject somewhat haphazard from whatever he can lay his hands 
upon. During winter, of course, the task is somewhat difficult, 
but he describes the winter migrants, and bids the children look 
out for them, making little rhymes to assist their memory, such 
as this for the Fieldfare, 
Rack-a-tack-tack 
Blue head and blue back, 
and this from Hudibras — 
As fools are known by looking wise 
So men catch Woodcocks by their eyes. 
He willingly sacrifices the buds of his rhododendrons and 
horse-chesnuts, to show the children the promise of the May, 
and the flower-shelf in school is occupied, even in the dead 
season, by the winter jasmine, the winter heliotrope and the 
winter aconite. 
The rectory porch is the receptacle of strange beasts and 
plants from January to December. There stands the glass- 
fronted caterpillar-box, which has been occupied in turn by the 
purple hair-streak and the death’s-head, the stag-beetle, the 
blind-worm and the barbastelle. 
But it is in the garden that his Selbornian instincts have free 
play. He tells the children that he has written the following 
inscription on the gate, in invisible ink : 
No birds that haunt my garden free 
To slaughter I condemn. 
Taught by the Power that pities me, 
I learn to pity them. 
Perhaps some day the letters may be visibly written on a 
brass plate. 
Two classes of the Sunday School meet at the rectory, boys 
in the morning and girls in the afternoon, and so become well 
accustomed to seeing the tits’ coco-nut, and are allowed to visit 
any nests of special interest ; and up to the present we have not 
had any certain case of this confidence being abused. 
The first Sunday in May is Flower Sunday, when the Rector 
is expected to preach to the children from a bunch of flowers. 
The columbine, the garlic-mustard, the narcissus, the adder’s- 
tongue, the gorse, the gout-weed, the bleeding-heart and the 
honesty have supplied obvious morals, but he thinks that this 
