followed his master by day, and made the same
speed as the boat, and always knew where to
land. The animal has powerful means of water
locomotion in the hind feet: his tail he uses as
a rudder.

Who or what told Brownie that Ben was to
land at Whitehall, I cannot know, but there he
was, ready to pay his ardent respects to his
master's pocket, for the sake of a sweet apple.

My sister Alice had hoped when she
married Ben to reform him of his passion for
four-footed pets, by furnishing substitutes; but
he went on the principle of "the more angels in
the heart the more room," only he read babies
and beavers instead of celestial beings. I
remember Mrs. Ben's rueful expression of face as
she exclaimed, " O dear! Brownie is a nuisance.
He has built a dam in the parlour, of the
fire-irons and fender and a music-stool. He has
made a double-roomed house at the back of it
with two ottomans, and lined them with the
leaves of my last music-book. And then he has
stolen my dried sweet apples, and laid them up
for his winter's provision. But he is welcome
to them now, for who would eat them after he
has messed them over! Indeed, Ben, he is a
nuisance."

"We are all nuisances sometimes," said Ben,
"beavers, babies, and grown men and women."

"I wish you would speak for yourself and
Brownie, and not for me and the babies, Ben,"
said Alice, laughing.

"Look at him!" said my brother, as Brownie
combed himself with the claws of his hind foot,
making his toilet as carefully as a cat, or a lady.
We all did look at him, and we all forgave his
mischief, and admired his neatness, sagacity,
and affection. All the world forgives the pets
and favourites when they serve or amuse
sufficiently to pay their way.

The end of poor Brownie was tragic, and
no settler in Canada has been more sincerely
mourned. To this day, a tender sadness fills my
heart when I think of him. He was mistaken
by a hunter for a wild beaver, when the
hunter was on an excursion with my brother in
the backwoods. He was shot. Ben got his
skin and had it stuffed, and to this day it is kept
as a parlour ornament in my brother's Canadian
house.

FRENCH VIPERS.

La Belle France, sunny France, the land of
wine and song, of the dance and joy unconfined
— except by an easy zone of police restriction
— who ever thought of it as a land of vipers!
The viper exists, indeed, in England, which is
merry, but he flourishes in France, which is gay.
Something of his French manners and customs,
the highways and byways, the life and times of
him, gathered from recent publications, and
personal observation, shall be set down here.

Of this, its only venomous reptile, France
possesses three species, the Aspic, the Pelias, and
the Ammodytes. To begin at the beginning:
Their fecundity is fearful, the female bringing
forth (as the family name viper— viviparous
— implies, alive and not in the egg like other
serpents) twelve, or a baker's dozen at a
birth.

In early babyhood, this pretty offspring spring
back through the opened jaws into the maternal
interior, as temporary refuge from danger. This
simply protective system of the female has been
falsely construed, by hostile human critics, as a
destructive system of filicide on the part of the
male. Let us be just even to ophidians. The
"subject of this memoir" attains his full majority
in his seventh year, and a contemporary aggregate
length of flat triangular head, clear defined
neck, blunt body, and brief tail, of about two
feet. Attached on either side to the upper of
his loose-jointed, flexible, elastic jaws, and within
the line of the teeth, is a fang, sheathed nearly
to its needle-sharp point, when in a quiescent
state, by an extension of the gum. It is not
unlike in shape, and in pro and retractile
faculty to a cat's claw. Through it runs a
canal fine as a hair, to the reservoir of poison at
its base. The reservoir is supplied by a
continuation of the duct back to the secretive gland
or arsenal, which is situate among, and protected
by, the temporal muscles. At the root of each
fang lies the germ of another, ready for quick
development. If the first be broken or torn
out in heedlessly fierce conflict, as with a
sportsman's boot, or a swine's tough hide, the
aspic retires within his lines, or to winter
quarters. There the glands secrete new
ammunition to supply the exhausted charge of
the reservoir, fine calibred fangs are refitted,
and everything is prepared for the next
campaign.

The flat triangular head and other parts of the
body are covered with scales, whose form and
arrangement furnish the clearest marks of
distinction among the three species, and of their
distinction from the comparatively harmless
adders and other serpents.

The ground colour varies extremely within
each species and their subdivisions, through all
shades of grey, yellow, red, black, and their
respective ishes, down to a dirtyish whitish.
Over the ground colour, whatever it may be,
save black, lie designed in darker tint, on the
head a more or less defined V— the family
initial— and following that, either pantherine
spots or tigeresque stripes harmonising with a
dorsal line from neck to tail.

The doctrine of signatures, so celebrated in the
schools of the middle ages, is now fallen to vulgar
practice. The essence of it consisted in the belief
that the Father of all had set the antidote always
near the bane,and kindly indicated, by signs visible
to his simplest children, the use and appliance
of the former to the latter. And so those plants
which in form or colour bore likeness to the
viper's shape or spotted skin came to be called
"Viperines," and much esteemed in the old
scholastic, as they still are in vulgar therapeutics.
Baleful, striped and spotted serpents, correspond
to the striped and spotted formidable enemies of