Page:BirdWatchingSelous.djvu/377

Rh these amiable basilisks, these busy little man-shaped rinderpests, who kill so well-meaningly and hate the very breath of life without ever once knowing it! if they had devoted their whole lives to picking pockets, or even to being politicians, they would have done, at the end of them, less harm—far, far less harm—in the world than they are now every day doing. Every day, through them, some specific life that is, or was, of more value than all their individual ones put together, is getting scarcer, or ceasing to be. For, surely, a beautiful butterfly, say, that, for all time, charms—and raises by charming—some number of those who see it, does more good on this earth than any single man or woman, who, "departing," leaves no "footprints on the sands of time." Homer, for instance, has left his "Iliad" and "Odyssey," and these have been, and still are, mighty in their effects. But let them once perish, and Homer will be caught up and overtaken by almost any bird or butterfly—even a brown one. Or, if Homer will not, assuredly many an English poet-laureate will be, or has been already (Pye, for instance), though his volumes in the British Museum are safe as consols. If there be any truth in this reflection, it should tend to make us a little less conceited than we are. Yet what is a little in such a matter?—"Oh, reform it altogether."

For myself, I must confess that I once belonged to this great, poor army of killers, though, happily, a bad shot, a most fatigable collector, and a poor, half-hearted bungler, generally. But now that I have watched birds closely, the killing of them seems to me as something monstrous and horrible; and, for every one that I have shot, or even only shot at