part of his programme, Puggins would announce
his victory in a series of brief Veni, vidi, vici,
bulletin barks, punctuating with crunching bites
at short distances along the victim's vertebral
column. Finally, if the field of battle were not
too far from home, he would take up the spoils in
his jaws and bear them, head and tail trailing low
on cether paw, into the house-yard triumphant.
There he would, before nightfall, paw out a grave,
then with infinite pains push the soft earth over
the interred reptile, patting it down delicately
with his blunt nose. Very jealous he was of
interference at this ceremony; so that if we
juveniles assisted too nearly and openly, he
would withdraw the corpse and recommence the
funeral rites behind the wood pile or under more
retired raspberry-bushes.

Storks, crows, choughs, hawks, kites and
other wild birds, and many domestic fowls also
prey upon our subject. The common barn-door
hen, set on by maternal passion, will attack and
conquer, then, with feminine zeal, pick to pieces
the insidious enemy of her chicks, and, clucking
triumphantly, call them to eat of him and
make their little hearts strong. Ducks, turkeys,
and geese, the innocentest, stupidest, likewise
boldly chase, kill and devour the symbols of
cunning and wisdom, their light feathers
protecting them against the fiercest biting.

And now to coil up this too long-winding
essay with what good words can be said for the
French viper. To begin with, he is not a seeker
of quarrel, does not sting unless provoked.
True, he is "something peevish," as Mrs.
Quickly would say— rather easily provoked;
can't abear, for example, to have his tail
trodden on, nor to be sat on, nor squeezed,
nor crowded, nor have sticks and things poked
at him. Who of the prosiest best of us, let
alone irritable poets, do like such treatment?
Our noble Norman ancestors thought him a fit
instrument of human, the editio vulgata of divine,
justice, committing their condemned to
dungeons infested with his company. The viper
has been grossly maligned by that delightful
old gossip Herodotus, by the poets, and by
vulgarer fabulists, when they charge the parents
with filicide and the offspring with parricide,
on scant observation and no proof. It is a libel
on the ancestors of the French aspic to lay to
any one of their accounts the death of
Cleopatra, Iras and Charmian, who— besides that
those females were no better than they should
be, if as well— were doubtless done to death
by a cerastes, a small malicious horned
serpent. Charitable apologists furthermore claim
that vipers do good service to the common
cause by destroying a great variety of vermin
and other noxious parties. Probably these
have also their uses, and will find their
apologists. The general economy of nature
still remains to the profoundest of our
purblind investigations a marvellous system of
checks and balances, of conservatively killed
and killing. A poet, wise beyond science, aptly
sang long ago the inconclusiveness of our
conclusion:

                   Great fleas have little fleas,
                   And less fleas to bite 'em;
                   These fleas have lesser fleas,
                   And so on ad infinitum.

In far wiser, higher strain, another sings his
grandly humble

                   Trust that somehow good
                   Will be the final goal of ill.
                        .     .      .     .      .
                   That nothing walks with aimless feet;
                   That not one life shall be destroyed,
                   Or cast as rubbish to the void,
                   When God hath made the pile complete.

The serpent with his tail in his mouth, has
passed for an emblem of eternity, because of its
endless circled completeness. The viper destroying
itself by its own mortal poison, is a subtler
emblem of everlasting life, because of its
symbolising the self-elimination of mortality:
the suicide of Death, Mort à la Mort.

HARLEQUIN FAIRY MORGANA!

IT was about four o'clock of a Monday evening
(to be particular), and only three days after the
festival of Christmas-day (to be a little more
particular); when the atmosphere was still
pleasantly charged with particles of plum-pudding;
when a fresh, inspiriting, and, on the whole,
not disagreeable darkness was setting in; and
when up in London, some five miles off, the
marvellous lamplighters were busy— how
wistfully did we in our youth regard the delightful
agility of those acrobats, and how often lament,
when meditating a choice of life under the school
blankets, that we could not be sent into that
profession instead of being designed for Church,
Bar, or Medicine!— I say it was at this season of
the year, and this particular season of the evening,
that word was passed down the playground that
Young Peebles was wanted by Old Bridles in the
parlour. The first of these descriptions referred
to myself, and was scarcely distinguished by nice
logical accuracy. For, I had not to be kept
separate from any other Peebles, young or old,
and the adjective, though characteristic, was
mere surplusage.

Old Bridles, though familiar and verging on
the disrespectful, was more happy as a popular
personal portrait. He was known more awfully
as the " Rev. J. C. Bridles, D.D., who was
prepared to receive a limited number of youths into
his family, to be fitted for the learned professions,"
the youths of more tender years being subjected to
the immediate personal superintendence of Mrs.
Bridles: a supervision, however, whose benefits
she kindly extended to all the young gentlemen
of the establishment.

The personality of Young Peebles (so I must
call him) took his way slowly and without
enthusiasm, to the presence of Old Bridles (for so, too,
I must call him). A few days ago, alas! it had
been different. The ceremonial of being cited to
the awe-inspiring parlour had then become
riotously frequent; crowds were rushing in that