sit up meekly and beg a crust of bread, and even a perennial fare of village moorgee cannot induce me to issue the order for their execution and conversion into pie.  But if such considerations cannot lead, the struggle for existence should drive a man in this country to learn the ways of his border tribes.  For no one, I take it, who reflects for an instant will deny that a small mosquito, with black rings upon a white ground, or a sparrow that has finally made up its mind to rear a family in your ceiling, exercises an influence on your personal happiness far beyond the Czar of the Russias.  It is not a question of scientific frontiers—­the enemy invades us on all, sides.  We are plundered, insulted, phlebotomised under our own vine and fig-tree.  We might make head against the foe if we laid to heart the lesson our national history in India teaches—­namely, that the way to fight uncivilised enemies is to encourage them to cut one another’s throats, and then step in and inherit the spoil.  But we murder our friends, exterminate our allies, and then groan under the oppression of the enemy.  I might illustrate this by the case of the meek and long-suffering musk-rat, by spiders or ants, but these must wait another day.”

Again he says, “The ‘poor dumb animals’ can give each other a bit of their minds like their betters, and to me their fierce and tender little passions, their loves and hates, their envies and jealousies, and their small vanities beget a sense of fellow-feeling which makes their presence society.  The touch of Nature which makes the whole world kin is infirmity.  A man without a weakness is insupportable company, and so is a man who does not feel the heat.  There is a large grey ring-dove that sits in the blazing sun all through the hottest hours of the day, and says coo-coo, coo, coo-coo, coo until the melancholy sweet monotony of that sound is as thoroughly mixed up in my brain with 110 deg. in the shade as physic in my infantile memories with the peppermint lozenges which used to ‘put away the taste,’ But as for these creatures, which confess the heat and come into the house and gasp, I feel drawn to them.  I should like to offer them cooling drinks.  Not that all my midday guests are equally welcome:  I could dispense, for instance, with the grey-ringed bee which has just reconnoitred my ear for the third time, and guesses it is a key-hole—­she is away just now, but only, I fancy, for clay to stop it up with.  There are others also to which I would give their conge if they would take it.  But good, bad, or indifferent they give us their company whether we want it or not.”