beetles' heaven, feeding upon the ambrosia of
their gods. They wallow in their plentiful cups
and sing roaring songs about beetle love and
double stout (they call it "rosy wine," of course),
and think it will be ever thus. But artful and
cruel man appears in the morning letting in the
reflective light, and the unhappy beetles know
that they have been deceived, they cry "Ha!
betrayed!" and make a rush to scramble up the
wall, but are so drunk that they all tumble
down again. And their fate is to be eaten
alive and in a state of intoxication by those
bloated bantams! Never did Roman emperor
enjoy such wild, ruthless, extravagant, luxurious
saturnalia as those fowls.

All this time my horse is in his stable, my
cow is in her shed, leading the dullest and most
monotonous of lives, getting no luxuries, seeing
no pleasure, but toiling or yielding day after
day for bare food. I don't think I have visited
my horse in his stable (to see that he is
comfortable) half a dozen times in as many years.
I don't remember treating him to any luxury,
except a few handfuls of clover, and I did not
let him have much of that, for fear that he
should be "blown," which would, of course,
have unfitted him for dragging me about town.
Whether the groom gives him sufficient food or
not, whether he has water when he requires it,
or if he is whipped or beaten when he is
naturally restive or uneasy, I do not know, and I
never care to inquire. It is enough for me
that he is at the door when I want him to do
my work. Yet I am not insensible to his claims
upon my consideration. I never over-drive him;
I am careful not to keep him standing in the
wet or the cold; I never use the whip to him,
except in the gentlest manner. Indeed, in this
respect, I am exceedingly tender-hearted. I
cannot bear to see a horse beaten, and would
rather miss a train or an appointment any day
than that my horse—were it a cab hack that I
had never seen before—should be urged along
with blows. With all this consideration for the
animal, I give him over to the tender mercies of
a groom, and in the hours when he should be
well fed and carefully tended, I leave him to
his fate. Yet I believe that a horse can appreciate
attentions from his master, that he likes to
be patted, and spoken to with kind words; that
it is a pleasure to him to receive food from his
master's hand; that he considers a biscuit or a
bit of bread a great treat. But these attentions
are lavished upon those unproductive animals,
the dog, the cat, and the pet bird. The hard-
working horse, like the hard-working man, gets
none of them.

The case of that gracious animal the cow is
even more pitiable. If a civilised people were
to lapse into the worship of animals, the cow
would certainly be their chief goddess. What
a fountain of blessing is a cow. She is the
mother of beef, the source of butter, the original
cause of cheese—to say nothing of horn spoons,
hair combs, and upper leathers. A gentle,
amiable, ever-yielding creature, who has no joy
in her family affairs which she does not share
with man. We rob her of her children that we
may rob her of her milk, and we only care for
her that the robbery may be perpetuated. How
little do we Londoners think of these patient,
devoted animals—to which we owe so many
necessaries and comforts—tied up by the neck
in close, foul, stiving sheds, feeding upon hard,
dry food, and never seeing the green fields, or
breathing pure country air, from one year's end
to another! How little do their owners think
of them, or care for them, until some epidemic
disease appears among them! Then, and not
till then, is our solicitude awakened—not,
however, for the ill-used, long-suffering cow, but for
our own selfish selves.

Perhaps if we were to pet our useful, hard-
working animals more, we should be more
worthy of the name of a humane people, and
find it both to our credit and our advantage.

REAL BRIGANDS.

THE poetic brigand of noble impulses and
elevated intellect, who has been driven to a
lawless life by the oppression of man, and who
is merely a hero turned the wrong side out—
that mysterious and glorious creature who sits
on a rock talking to himself, and apostrophising
the moon, his mother, and the distant sheep-
bells below, while confiding Medora or devoted
Gulnare watches for his coming or waits on his
moods—that courtly gentleman of the green-
wood, who is brave to his foes, generous to the
vanquished, and chivalrous to woman, is doubtless
a very fascinating personage, especially to
the young; but the real brigand, seen as he is,
and not through the softening, haze of romance,
is a different creature. A greedy truculent
half-starved coward, whose life is one of
perpetual fear, who shivers with terror if the
troops be within hail, and whose greatest
exploits are performed by overwhelming
numbers against defenceless passers-by—a mean
thief stealing shirts and stockings, and bits of
stale bread from a helpless captive—a savage,
now gorging himself with meat, and now fainting
for want of food—inexpressibly dirty and
shabby—brutal to the woman who has
temporarily united herself to him—alternately
the tyrant and the victim, the extortioner
and the prey of the peasant—the bandit, as
MR. MOENS* found and has described him, is
about as repulsive a ruffian as one would wish
not to see anywhere; the brigand of romance
and reality having no more resemblance to each
other than Voltaire's Huron has to the stamping
grunting rascal who quails before a "medicine-
man" with a bladder rattle, but who takes
the scalp of a fallen enemy as his version of
"Who's afraid?"

* English Travellers and Italian Bandits.
W. J. C. Moens.

There never was a book which took all the
romance out of a thing more completely than
his dashing and unaffected narrative of the
English traveller who went down to Pæstum,