so death to them! And birds grew scarcer and
scarcer throughout the province. But matters
were brought to a climax, indeed, when a
remonstrance was sent down from the ministry in Paris,
with orders that the printed document should be
affixed to the door of every mairie and chapel, and
that the destruction of birds should be stayed.
I read the paper, which was terse and good, and
pointed out very forcibly what an important link
in the chain of nature would be missing were
the feathered tribes swept away from earth.
The farmer was warned that in murdering birds
he was fostering noxious insects; he was
reminded that a few ears of corn, and a little fruit,
were but a small makeweight to ricks burrowed
by the weevil, and fields black with the fly; and
that the tiny destroyers would harm his crops a
thousand-fold more than ever the poor tomtits
and chaffinches had done.

There were those who had the sense to
listen to this well-timed appeal. There were
more who gaped incredulously at the statistics,
and let the nest-robbing and sparrow battues go
on. But to the marquis such a piece of advice
was gall and wormwood. He change his
practices at the bidding of an usurping government!
He receive good counsel at the hands of an
imperialist minister of agriculture! He assembled
his tenants, harangued them in a speech that
came very close to sedition, and set himself to
thwart the wise and kind designs of the authorities,
with all the short-sighted malevolence of
an ill-tempered child.

Such a massacre of birds as then took place
the country had never known. The songs of
the grove and meadow were silenced. Rewards
were offered for the heads of lark and robin,
thrush and wren, anything with beak and
feathers. Gangs of birds'-nesters prowled through
the woods, guns popped ingloriously all day
long among vines and hedgerows, poisoned grain
was thickly strewn about, until hundreds and
thousands of dead birds lay stiff and stark on
the inhospitable soil.

The usual consequences of such suicidal folly
succeeded. There was a Nemesis of insect life,
in the second year of my stay, which made
the most obstinate farmer stare aghast at the
countless legions burrowing, creeping, or winging
their way to blight his hopes of profit. Grubs,
caterpillars, flies, weevils, everything that crawls
or flies, that bores the root or gnaws the bursting
corn-ear, or cankers the blossom, or hollows
out the fruit, everything that tunnels the bark
or harms the wood of trees, everything that
haunts the barn or the store, seemed gathered
in hosts undreamed of. There were no birds
to thin off the plunderers. Those faithful allies
had been stupidly butchered. Their sharp-
sighted little eyes and active bills would have
done, for scanty wage, a hundred times more to
stem the plague than all the hired labourers could
do, with all their work of crushing and quick-
liming, sulphuring and smoking. What with loss
to grain, trees, and fruit, what with the cost of
keeping down the pest by human agency, every
cultivator suffered heavily, and the marquis found
his income and his popularity waning together.
For, people began to regret the birds, and to
blame the noble adviser who had urged their
extermination. But the marquis was a dogged
personage; he would not own himself in the
wrong; he hired more and more men to dress
the trees of his orchards, and he tried to make
clumsy human fingers and toes do the work of
the tomtit and the swallow.

On one sad afternoon in early autumn, while
they were gathering the wreck of the fruit crop,
little Henri begged for a walk in the woods. It
was a dark hot lowering day; the air was heavy
and dull; and the great masses of copper-coloured
cloud that hung lazily in the deep blue sky,
had a lurid tinge that threatened storm. All
nature seemed oppressed beneath the menace
of the gathering tempest, and the hum of
the insects sounded sullen among the shrubs
of the garden. I declined to accompany my
young charge so far as the woods, but
suggested as a compromise that we should repair
to a certain hill-side orchard, where I knew the
fruit was to be gathered that day. Thither
we bent our steps, and, seating ourselves on
a mossy bank close to the edge of the forest,
which in that place bordered the cultured land,
we watched the workers. It was a busy scene.
Crowds of peasants: the men in blouse and
striped nightcap: the women with broad hats of
coarse yellow straw, crimson kirtles, and sabots
of black wood: were swarming round the trees,
filling baskets with red-cheeked apples and
violet or yellow plums. But the fair promise of
many a tree proved hollow and fallacious, the
caterpillar and grub had been beforehand with
the gleaners, and the men were more busy in
killing insects than in piling fruit.

I took a book out of my pocket and began to
read, giving Henri permission to join one of the
groups of apple-pickers, in which old Pierre and
his daughter, the blanchisseuse of the château,
were employed. Presently I sauntered down to
join the party, and found Henri, rosy with
exercise, clambering into the upper branches of
a gnarled old tree, the trunk of which he had
scaled by help of a ladder.

"Hola, cher enfant!" I exclaimed, in some
trepidation; "have a care, or you will tumble
and hurt yourself."

"No fear, Mr. Kirby," cried the laughing
child. "See those apples up above! I will pick
them." And he pointed to a cluster of fine fruit
on a lofty bough, while the servants clapped their
hands, and applauded the courage of young "M.
le Vicomte."

Plump! A great ugly caterpillar, dislodged
by the boy's shaking the tree, fell upon my foot,
and then another, and then another, a perfect
shower of caterpillars. I picked one of them
up. It seemed to be of a new species, and as
I had commenced, in a humble way, the study
of entomology, I placed it in a tin box to carry
home. The peasants were less critical.

"Ah, the wicked beasts!" they cried; "it is
they that spoil the apple-crop. Peste! there
must be a regular nest of them aloft. Shake