Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/520

26, 1860.] in search of insects. It sees me, and is in an instant behind the tree. The wren, also, “pipes his lay,” and, with the activity of a mouse, hides himself in yonder bush. The shrill note of the nuthatch is heard. It is a favourite of mine, for all its actions are peculiar and amusing. Sir William Jardine informs us that, when roosting, it sleeps with its back and head downwards.

But among the sounds I hear in the copse let me not forget to mention the cuckoo—for,

What pleasing associations do his notes produce in the spring! From the peasant boy to the steady old labourer, from the milkmaid to the queen, by rich and poor, it is heard with delight as the harbinger of fine weather, and as one of our most joyous rural sounds.

But it is time to quit the copse and return homewards: but before I do so I must visit the little brook that runs through the lower part of it, and listen to the pleasing notes of the sedge-warbler, and also of my favourite blackcap, who generally haunts this secluded part of the wood. He is, in my opinion, but little inferior to the nightingale, having a great variety of sweet and imitative notes.

My way home leads me over a wild heath (my scene is taken from nature in one of the beechen copses of Buckinghamshire), and there the plover—

It is indeed an interesting sight to watch the cunning, indeed bold artifices to which this bird resorts to draw off intruders from her nest. I would not hurt thee, poor bird! but will retire to my home as quickly as possible to remove all thy fears and anxieties. I will only add, in the words of Mr. Rogers,—

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are wives enough to be had. There are English, Parisian, Norman, and even Flemish, mothers clucking to fair broods of daughters. On all sides the maternal cluck! cluck! reminds me that when I may be in search of a wife, I shall not have very far to go.

I am sitting upon a pebbly shore on the coast of picturesque Normandy. I have been assisting at the opening of a splendid bathing establishment, which is to make our favourite Norman port not only an irresistible holiday place for the Parisians, but also a point for a friendly English invasion. I have breakfasted sumptuously with the mayor (who, let me add in confidence, is the builder of the bathing establishment in question); I have assisted at an opening ball; and I have had the proud satisfaction of drinking Lyons beer with the mayor’s adjoint. But worldly honours oppress my humble shoulders. I choose rather, on this day of savage heat, to pull my felt hat over my dazzled eyes, and mark the trim ladies, with their red and purple petticoats, pass (like animated fuchsia flowers perched upon patent leather styles) before my unworthy retina. My elbow rests upon good Dr. Brown’s Philosophy of the Mind, and I cry “Ah, me!” that I cannot drink deeper to-day of his generous doctrine. He has put me in a pleasant train of thought; he has warmed my heart; he was a good man, and I lift my hat to him. I wish that I had been one of his listeners some time ago in classic Edinburgh.

Lonely bachelor that I am! why should I read of “the ministry of tender courtesies?” There are my chambers, dull and dusty, some three hundred miles away from this, where my minister of tender courtesies charges me five shillings a week to light my fire and broil my matutinal bloater. These are tender courtesies I buy at a fixed price. I am away from my chambers now, and am saving my five shillings, so that even my largely-bonneted, be-pattened minister of courtesies—whose voice is the faint echo of that of a cabman in a fog—is estranged from me. And I am alone, while these human butterflies swim past me, with the heavy parental moth at their wing. A moth, by the way, must be a dowager butterfly.

Why did I open Dr. Brown’s bulky volume of philosophy at the eighty-eighth lecture, and read page after page about the “duties of affinity,” till I found myself in the virgin gold and speckless ivory halls of holy matrimony? More grateful to me is the sleet-bearing east wind than the waving of Love’s “purple wings.” Not in my chambers shall his “constant lamp” be lighted. I am alone in the world, and in proof of my determination to remain alone I have lately bought a patent bachelor’s-kitchen which would enable me to cook a chop, boil an egg, or turn out a cup of boiling coffee in two minutes—if I could only make it burn. Wicked eyes, tender eyes, mournful eyes, timid eyes, rest upon me by turns, passing me, as I rest my elbow upon the old doctor’s lecture on the duties of affinity. And I mark each goddess as she passes, dimpling the wet sand with her dainty high-heeled boots. Wicked-eyes carries two soiled volumes of the younger Dumas. I feel the old Scotch doctor trembling between his modest cloth covers at the scandal. Wicked-eyes is proud and confident, however, and she lights presently upon the soiled pages, in the shadow of a broken fishing-smack. The fingers, in faint yellow gloves, slender as maccaroni, that turn young Dumas’ page, would not, I am certain, set that light right in my patent bachelor-kitchen. A thimble would sit awkwardly on any of those saffron digits. Wicked-eyes has a mother, I see; a tall stately dame who hopes to pass for the sister of her child. But her