Page:The common reader.djvu/194

 “But there’ll be some very unpleasant consequences to face,” she concluded—“Very unpleasant indeed.”

Happily the port was now brought in, the servants assembled; and Miss Ormerod, rising to her feet, gave the toast “Her Blessed Majesty.” She was extremely loyal, and moreover she liked nothing better than a glass of her father’s old white port. She kept his pig-tail, too, in a box.

Such being her disposition it went hard with her to analyse the sparrow’s crop, for the sparrow she felt, symbolises something of the homely virtue of English domestic life, and to proclaim it stuffed with deceit was disloyal to much that she, and her fathers before her, held dear. Sure enough the clergy—the Rev. J. E. Walker—denounced her for her brutality; “God Save the Sparrow!” exclaimed the Animal’s Friend; and Miss Carrington, of the Humanitarian League, replied in a leaflet described by Miss Ormerod as “spirity, discourteous, and inaccurate.”

“Well,” said Miss Ormerod to her sister, “it did me no harm before to be threatened to be shot at, also hanged in effigy, and other little attentions.”

“Still it was very disagreeable, Eleanor—more disagreeable I believe, to me than to you,” said Georgiana. Soon Georgiana died. She had however finished the beautiful series of insect diagrams at which she worked every morning in the dining-room and they were presented to Edinburgh University. But Eleanor was never the same woman after that.

Dear forest fly—flour moths—weevils—grouse and