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censured; and this, on the occasion of an appeal, which he addressed 
to Miss Susan, for the loan of a certain, single-barrelled gun, ‘to shoot 
them oudacious blackbirds.” He affirmed, that they not only stole his 
fruit, but that, when he drove them away, they just ‘‘ popped on to the 
top of the wall, and then turned round, and sawced him.” He had 
invented scare-crows of such repulsive aspect, as would have scared, he 
was sure, any decent birds into fits; but those brutes had come back, 
as imperent as imperent. One effigy, that of a gentleman, fully armed 
with the artillery, which Joseph desired to realize, and threatening grim 
destruction to all around, they had treated with conspicuous scorn, sitting 
upon the fowling-piece, ‘‘ disgesting,” as Mr. Grundy said, and using 
the entire creation as a kind of lounge, and worse. So had they 
exceeded in effrontery those their naughty brothers, of whom we read, 
m a recent delightful biography,* that when the ladies set up an old 
packing-case, with a piece of red bunting affixed thereto, as an object 
which could not fail to dismay the winged banditti of the neighbourhood, 
‘they stood upon the box to eat the Cherries, and then wiped their 
beaks on the rag!”’ 
Were not these provocations sufficient, think you, to disturb even the 
placid spirit of a Grundy, and to make sour within him the rich custards 
of his human kindness? A mouse, we read, set the lion free; and a 
blackbird may rouse the British ditto, even as the twopenny tin horn of 
the bird-tenter :iay excite the startled hunter, or speak to the charger 
of war. So there he stood, erect in all the majesty of wrath, bold as 
Ajax defying the lightning, and suggesting that he should like a gun. 
And wherefore is Miss Susan mute? Stands she aghast, astonied, 
speechless, at the indelicate behaviour of the feathered tribe, or where- 
fore isshe dumb? She loved those blackbirds well, and now she wears 
the strangely piteous look of one, hearing, for the first time, harsh things 
of her beloved, and listening to the most respectable evidence that the 
joy of her soul is a thief. There she stands, grandly indignant, like the 
Lady Ida, when she found three men in petticoats among her “sweet 
girl- graduates ”:— 
‘a tide of fierce 
Invective seem’d to wait behind her lips, 
As waits a river, level with the dam, 
Ready to burst, and flood the world with foam.” 
But Miss Susan keeps the flood-gates closed, and without a werd, the 
heart’s stream too flush and deep to ripple, she walks slowly, sternly, 
to the house. 
But it is not the birds, my reader, who have caused this sad dismay. 
It is “ animal implume,” it is Joseph Grundy, for whom this stillness in 
the air portends a thunder-storm. Two hours afterward it fell. 
I must tell you, first of all, that a real shower, material not meta- 
phorical, had just refreshed the earth, and all the leaves of the glossy 
evergreens were shining, ‘‘as if” (Mrs. Verjuice beautifully said) 
‘every one of ’em had been French--polished,” when Miss Susan went 
forth to speak her mind. Poor Joseph’s mocking bird was singing on 
the tree, as though he had wet his whistle to some purpose, and had 

* The Life of Patrick Fraser Tytler. 
