PILFERING HABITS. 
in question led to all appearance a virtuous life, and was never 
known to filch as much as a bit of riband. Well, one day a 
tiny gold watch, belonging to the gentleman’s wife, was gone, 
stolen from her bedroom. Two or three days previous to the 
theft, a new housemaid had been engaged, and as she, and no 
one else, had business in the room in question, she was sus- 
pected, and a constable sent for. High and low searched the 
constable, till he came to the girl’s bedroom, and then plainly 
enough there was a tick, tick, ticking somewhere. Fancy the poor 
housemaid’s terror, when the constable put first his head, then 
his arm up the chimney, and out of a hole produced the missing 
watch. Luckily at the very moment master magpie made his 
appearance among the company. “ Is that your bird, sir ?” 
asked the constable. “ It is.” “ Then I think we will have 
another dive,” replied the sensible fellow, plunging his arm up 
the chimney again. He was not unrewarded, for when his 
hand again made its appearance, it grasped a pair of spectacles 
that had been lost months before. Three silk handkerchiefs, 
a child’s coral, a toothpick, and sundry other trifles, were pro- 
duced in succession, to the wonder of the girl’s master and 
mistress, the joy of the girl, and the discomfiture of the magpie, 
who stood by, like a detected thief as he was, eyeing the constable 
as though he expected to be immediately handcuffed and walked 
off. 
One would have thought, after such an exposure, that the 
magpie would have mended his ways. He didn’t. Scarcely a 
fortnight afterwards he threw the family into a state of alarm 
by one day appearing amongst them sneezing and coughing, and 
evidently in an advanced stage of suffocation. It was presently 
discovered that a small bottle of smelling salts was missing, 
and after a short search it was found in the hole in the chimney, 
with the silver-sheathed cork lying by its side. 
The malpractices of this bird ended tragically. One day he 
purloined from a sideboard the silver-mounted cork of a brandy 
bottle. The cork was thoroughly impregnated with the flavour 
of the spirit, so poor Mag nibbled and pecked away till the 
whole was devoured ; the consequence was a stoppage in the 
internal regions from which he never recovered. 
“ I once,” says a correspondent, “ had a magpie, who, soon 
after his arrival at my house, struck up a singular friendship 
with a favourite Newfoundland dog, which I had some years 
in my service. Lion was a splendid fellow, a fine specimen of 
his variety, and immensely strong. Bob, the magpie, was one 
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