A NATURALIST ON THE PROWL. 
150 
rice fields, and little boys are busy all day flinging stones 
at it. I have longed to tell them that they sinned against 
their own natures when they tried to dash to pieces with 
rude stones a creature so lovely, and that they should rather 
rejoice to see it eat and be happy. But the son of the rice 
farmer is a utilitarian, and in this disjointed world of ours 
there is a hereditary feud between the useful and the 
beautiful. It should not be so : there must be some way 
of reconciliation, but no one has worked it out. Hence 
our shrieking railways and smoke-belching factories, and 
the bottomless pits where grimy diggers find the food for 
their greedy furnaces. And when the beautiful would fly 
from such companionship and leave us altogether, we shut it 
up in a fenced place and call it a park, or a people’s garden. 
On a smaller scale, in the alleys and lanes of the bazaar, 
a poor man here and there cages beauty in the form of the 
little Rose-headed Parrakeet. He has not heard that say- 
ing of Goethe : “ Men are so inclined to content themselves 
with what is commonest; the spirit and the senses so easily 
grow dead to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect, 
that everyone should study by all methods to nourish in 
his mind the faculty of feeling these things. For this 
reason one ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, 
