not very nice and easy to deal with. It is all
very well for gardening-books simply to say,
"Snails are destroyed by crushing." Of course
they are; but who likes to do it? William
Slitherhouse, I say it to his honour, was not
the man. Robbed though he was every year
of the best part of the produce of his garden,
he could never make up his mind to use his
virtuous amateur spade for any such purpose.
It is true that a chemist in the neighbourhood,
having whispered to him that salt was a
deadly poison to snails, our friend did once
deposit a score of them in a flower-pot, and then
cast over the moving mass of shells and horns
half a handful of salt. But he never did it
twice. The instantaneous shrinking back of
all those protruding and inquiring horns—
the yellow froth of the shell-mouths, and the
anguished rolling over of the shells, was too
much for him—and no wonder. Mr. Slitherhouse's
servant, an old woman of no imagination,
once collected a heap of snails from the
palings near the ditch at the bottom of the
garden, and after scolding them all down the
pathway into the kitchen, threw them into
the fire. She received warning that very
day.

Mr. Slitherhouse now adopted the plan of
collecting two or three scores of the
marauders in a pocket-handkerchief, and carrying
them a few miles off to deposit them beneath
the hedge of some field. By these means he
avoided the horrors of gelatinous contortions,
and all the spittings and splutterings attending
extermination; while, at the same time, he
reconciled the fact of such injury as the snails
might do to the hedge-leaves and field-grass,
by the reflection that snails were sent iuto the
world to eat something, and that he had not
the least knowledge of the person who owned
the field. Perhaps it belonged to Her Most
Gracious Majesty the Queen, in which case
there was no harm done.

No doubt can exist but the revulsion caused
in the mind of Mr. Slitherhouse, by the
previous murders that he had himself committed
as well as witnessed during the " reign of
terror," had caused a re-action in his feelings,
so that he now pursued his task of tracing
out and capturing the interlopers with a
degree of interest in the creatures themselves.
This naturally increased as he bestowed more
and more observation on their structure and
habits. One day he noticed a snail whose
shell had been partially crushed, creeping into
a cranny in the wall with the languid air of
an invalid going to the hospital. Finding it
still there the next time he visited the spot,
he attentively watched its operations, and the
creature's repair of its shell, in each stage of
the process. At length it was all made
compact once more and hardened in the wind,
and the very first morning the snail issued
forth after its recovery, Mr. Slitherhouse had
the pleasure of witnessing one of those scenes
so excellently described by Mr. Rymer Jones,
in which the snail, meeting with an admirer
of its own species, they each began to make
extraordinary demonstrations in the air with
their horns (or rather, the tentacles) and
exhibited an alacrity of gesticulation in the
uplifting and twirling the head and neck,
which showed that their love, though at first
sight, was mutual.

From this day we have to date a great
change in the mind of Mr. Slitherhouse. He
now pursued his researches after snails with
a very different eye from that of a gardener.
He had unconsciously become a close observer
—a naturalist. " No doubt," mused he, in his
little summer-house, built after the approved
manner of English suburban villas, on the
borders of the ditch—" No doubt but the
department of Natural History which I have
adopted for especial study, is not very
extensive; nevertheless, there must be a great
many snails in the world, and as nature loves
variety, they are probably not all alike." In
order to ascertain how the fact stood in this
respect, he sent to a bookseller for Mr. Lovell
Reeve's book on the subject, having been
informed that this contained the most
comprehensive account, and was also the latest
authority. He desired that the pamphlet,
or whatever else that author had written
on snails, should be forwarded to him by
post.

The bookseller had the good sense to spare
Mr. Slitherhouse the postage, and forwarded
the "order" by the Parcels' Delivery
Company—a large quarto volume of some two
hundred pages, with nearly a hundred plates,
all beautifully drawn and coloured (fac-similes)
of the original snail-shells, price five guineas.
Mr. Slitherhouse, with an equal mixture of
pride, respectful awe, and delight, sank back
in his arm-chair, and sat staring at the quarto
as it lay upon the table, not yet quite emancipated
from the thick sheets of brown paper
in which it had been packed.

Lying by the side of the goodly quarto was
a thin pamphlet by the same author, " On the
Geographical Distribution of the Bulimi "—
(Mr. Slitherhouse felt the importance of snails
considerably enhanced as he pronounced the
word, and he assumed a more dignified attitude
in his chair as he read furthermore) "a
Genus of terrestrial Mollusca; and on the
Modification of their Shell to the local physical
Conditions in which the Species occur. By
Lovell Eeeve, F.L.S., &c., with a map! " Mr.
Slitherhouse turned over the pages with
avidity, devouring their contents—with his
eyes. He took an enthusiastic flight and a
bird's-eye view of the whole. He saw what a
field was before him. That day the
abstemious naturalist drank nearly a whole bottle of
port wine after dinner. He felt quite another
man. He sat with his eyes fixed on the wall
of his room, till the papering gradually
assumed the outlines of Mr. Reeve's coloured
map, and his imagination became geographical
as he wandered over the world in the pursuit
of snails.