rity of the implanted instinct, never made a shipwreck in eddy or sank in the pool. It is to these little creatures that Wordsworth refers in one of his sonnets on sleep: "O sleep, thou art to me A fly that up and down himself doth shove Now on the water, vexed with mockery." As shown, however, to the poet himself on one occasion, somewhat to his discomfort, by assuredly no mean 10 authority -Mr. James Wilson - the "vexed" "fly," though one of the hemipterous insects, never uses its wings, and so never gets "above" the water. Among my other favorites were the splendid dragonflies, the crimson-speckled Burnet moths, and the small 15 azure butterflies, that, when fluttering among delicate harebells and crimson-tipped daisies, used to suggest to me, long ere I became acquainted with the pretty figure of Moore,* or even the figure had been produced, the idea of flowers that had taken to flying. The wild 20 honey-bees, too, in their several species, had peculiar charms for me. There were the buff-colored carders, that erected over their honey-jars domes of moss; the lapidary red-tipped bees, that built amid the recesses of ancient cairns, and in old dry stone walls, and were so 25 invincibly brave in defending their homesteads that they never gave up the quarrel till they died; and, above all, the yellow-zoned humblebees, that lodged deep in the ground along the dry sides of grassy banks, and were usually wealthier in honey than any of their congeners, 30 *The beautiful blue damsel-fly, That fluttered round the jessamine stems, Paradise and the Peri. 5 and existed in larger communities. But the herd-boys of the parish, and the foxes of its woods and brakes, shared in my interest in the wild honey-bees, and, in the pursuit of something else than knowledge, were ruthless robbers of their nests. I often observed that 5 the fox, with all his reputed shrewdness, is not particularly knowing on the subject of bees. He makes as dead a set on a wasp's nest as on that of the carder or humblebee, and gets, I doubt not, heartily stung for his pains; for though, as shown by the marks of his teeth 10 left on fragments of the paper combs scattered about, he attempts eating the young wasps in the chrysalis state, the undevoured remains seem to argue that he is but little pleased with them as food. There were occasions, however, in which even the herd-boys met with 15 only disappointment in their bee-hunting excursions; and in one notable instance the result of the adventure used to be spoken of in school and elsewhere under our breath, and in secret, as something very horrible. A party of boys had stormed a humblebee's nest on the 20 side of the old chapel-brae, and, digging inward along the narrow winding earth-passage, they at length came to a grinning human skull, and saw the bees issuing thick from out a round hole at its base-the foramen magnum. The wise little workers had actually formed 25 their nest within the hollow of the head once occupied by the busy brain; and their spoilers, more scrupulous than Samson of old-who seems to have enjoyed the meat brought out of the eater," and the sweetness extracted from the strong-left in very great consterna-30 tion their honey all to themselves. V. THE OLD MAN AT THE GATE. BY DOUGLAS JERROLD.' IN Surrey, some three miles from Chertsey, is a quiet sequestered nook, called Shepperton Green. At the time whereof we write the olden charity dwelt in an old workhouse-a primitive abiding-place for the broken ploughman, the palsied shepherd, the old, old peasant, for whom nothing more remained in this world but to die. The governor of this abode of benevolence dwelt in the lower part of the building, and therein, as the village trade might fluctuate, made or mended shoes. Let the plain truth be said-the governor was a cobbler. 10 Within a stone's - cast of the workhouse was a little white gate swung between two hedge-banks in the road to Chertsey. Here, pass when you would, stood an old man, whose self-imposed office it was to open the gate; for the which service the passenger would drop some 15 small benevolence in the withered hand of the aged peasant. This man was a pauper-one of the almsmen of the village workhouse. There was a custom-whether established by the governor aforesaid, or by predecessors of a vanished 20 century, we know not-that made it the privilege of the oldest pauper to stand the porter at the gate; his perquisite, by right of years, the half-pence of the rare pedestrian. As the senior died, the living senior succeeded to the office. Now the gate-and now the grave. 25 5 And this is all the history? All. —it will not bear another syllable. The story is told The "Old Man” is at the gate; the custom which places him there has been made known and with it ends the narrative. Cast How few the incidents of life-how multitudinous its emotions! How flat, monotonous, may be the circumstance of daily existence, and yet how various the thoughts which spring from it! Look at yonder landscape, broken into hill and dale, with trees of every hue and form, and water winding in silver threads through 10 velvet fields. How beautiful!-for how various. your eye over that moor; it is flat and desolate—barren as barren rock. Not so. Seek the soil, and then, with nearer gaze, contemplate the wondrous forms and colors of the thousand mosses growing there; give ear to the 15 hum of busy life sounding at every root of poorest grass. Listen! Does not the heart of the earth beat audibly beneath this seeming barrenness—audibly as where the corn grows and the grape ripens? Is it not so with the veriest rich and the veriest poor-with the 20 most active and with apparently the most inert? That "Old Man at the Gate" has eighty years upon his head-eighty years, covering it with natural reverence. He was once in London-only once. This pilgrimage excepted, he has never journeyed twenty miles 25 from the cottage in which he was born; of which he became the master; whereto he brought his wife; where his children saw the light, and their children after; and whence, having with a stout soul fought against the strengthening ills of poverty and old age, he was thrust 30 by want and sickness out, and with a stung heart he laid his bones upon a workhouse bed. Life to the "Old Man" has been one long path across a moor--a flat, unbroken journey; the eye uncheered, the heart unsatisfied. Coldness and sterility have compassed him round. Yet has he been subdued to the blankness of his destiny? Has his mind remained the unwrit page that schoolmen talk of? has his heart become a clod? Has he been made by poverty a moving 5 image-a plough-guiding, corn-threshing instrument? Have not unutterable thoughts sometimes stirred within his brain—thoughts that elevated, yet confused him with a sense of eternal beauty-coming upon him like the spiritual presences to the shepherds? Has he not been 10 beset by the inward and mysterious yearning of the heart towards the unknown and the unseen? He has been a ploughman. In the eye of the well-to-do, dignified with the accomplishments of reading and writing, he is of little more intelligence than the oxen treading the 15 glebe. Yet, who shall say that the influence of nature -that the glories of the rising sun-may not have called forth harmonies of soul from the rustic drudge, the moving statue of a man! That worn-out, threadbare remnant of humanity at 20 the gate; age makes it reverend, and the inevitableshall inevitable be said?—injustice of the world invests it with majesty; the majesty of suffering meekly borne, and meekly decaying. "The poor shall never cease out of the land." This text the self-complacency of com-95 petence loveth to quote: it hath a melody in it, a lulling sweetness to the selfishness of our nature. Hunger and cold and nakedness are the hard portion of man; there is no help for it; rags must flutter about us; man, yes, even the strong man, his only wealth (the wealth of 30 Adam) wasting in his bones, must hold his pauper hand to his brother of four meals per diem; it is a necessity of nature, and there is no help for it. And thus some men send their consciences to sleep by the chinking |