564 
have been extinct long ago. Nature 
may be “red with tooth and claw,” but 
not suicidally so. It is to quite a peace- 
able, if not wholly loving, world that she 
‘invites us. And just here we can see so 
much of it; we can study it so broadly 
and so freely. Concord and Walden 
dwindle into the microscopic. It was 
under precisely such a sun as this, in a 
warm, dry atmosphere, on a nearly tree- 
less soil, that the Stagyrite did all the 
thinking of sixty generations. Could 
he have done it in an overcoat and muf- 
fler, with a chronic catarrh ? 
If, impatient of a host of inarticulate 
instructors, we prefer communing with 
our kind and falling back on human 
story, some of that, too, is at hand. 
Half a century ago, to a year, a short 
string of forlorn and forlorn-looking 
people crossed the prairie close by, from 
west to east, from the Colorado to the 
Brazos. The head of it was Sam Hous- 
ton’s “army,” three or four hundred 
strong, with all its matériel in one wagon. 
The rest consisted of the débris of all 
the Anglo-American settlements, women, 
children, cows, and what poor household 
stuff could be moved. Slowly ferrying 
the Brazos, and as slowly making its 
way down the left bank, picking up as 
it went the rest of the homesteads and 
some more fighting-men, it turned to 
the right at the head of the estuary. 
Then the little column, strengthened 
with some sea-borne supplies and re- 
lieved of its wards, turned to face its 
pursuers. These were twice its num- 
bers, with four or five thousand re- 
serves some days behind. Generalship 
was given the go-by on both sides, the 
cul-de-sac of San Jacinto being closed 
at both ends. Thirty minutes of noise 
and smoke, and the empire of Cortez 
and Montezuma was split in two. Clio 
nibbed another quill, steel pens not 
having then been invented. ‘The gray 
geese who might have supplied it re- 
composed themselves on the prairie, and 
all the rest of their feathered friends 
followed their example, as the military 
interlude melted away and left them 
their ancient solitary reign. 
Of the feathered spectators of the 
BIRDS OF A TEXAN WINTER. 
[Dec. 
scene we have episodically glanced at, 
the most interested were those constant 
supervisors, the vultures. Of these 
there are three species, one of which— 
the Mexican vulture—is but an occa- 
sional visitor. The other two—the black 
vulture and the turkey-buzzard — are 
monopolists in their peculiar line. They 
constitute here, as generally throughout 
the warmer parts of the continent and 
its islands, the recognized sanitary 
police. No law protects them, but they 
do not need it. They are too useful 
not to command that popular sympathy 
which is the higher law. The flocks 
and herds upon a thousand plains are 
theirs. Every norther that freezes and 
every drought that starves some of the 
wandering cattle and sheep brings to 
them provision. ‘The railroads also, not 
less than the winds of heaven, are their 
friends, the fatal cow-catcher being an 
ever-busy caterer. The buzzards are, 
of course, under such circumstances, 
warm advocates of internal improve- 
ment and welcome the opening of every 
new railway. Their ardor in this re- 
spect, however, has of late years been 
damped by the building of wire fences 
along the track, an interference with 
vested rights and an assault upon, the 
hoary claims of infant industries against 
which in their solemn assemblies they 
doubtless often condole with each other. 
Unfortunately for their cause, they can- 
not lobby. 
Somehow, there seems to be always a 
wag or clown among each group of ani- 
mals,—some one species in which the 
amusing or the grotesque is prominent. 
Among these clownish fellows I should 
class the black vulture, or john-crow. 
He is not a crow at all, but gets that 
name probably because so historic a 
tribe as Corvus must have some repre- 
sentative, and the real crow, so common 
at the North, is one of the few birds 
that are not much seen in this quarter. 
John unites in his ways at once fuss 
and business. He alternates oddly be- 
tween bustle and gravity. Seated stately 
and motionless for hours on a leafless 
tree, he will suddenly, as if struck by a 
new idea, start off on a tour that might 
/ 
