* * * * *

“Why, it’s in print!” said Father Cock; “and I said as plain as any cock could crow, that it was a secret.  Now, who let it out?”

“Don’t talk to me about secrets,” said the fair foreigner; “I never trouble my head about such things.”

“Some people are very fond of drawing attention to their heads,” said the common hen; “and if other people didn’t think more of a great unnatural-looking chignon than of all the domestic virtues put together, they might have their confidences respected.”

“I’s all very well,” said Father Cock, “but you’re all alike.  There’s not a hen can know a secret without going and telling it.”

“Well, come!” said a little Bantam hen, who had newly arrived; “whichever hen told it, the cock must have told it first.”

“What’s that ridiculous nonsense your talking?” cried the cock; and he ran at her and pecked her well with his beak.

“Oh! oh! oh!” cried the Bantam.

Dab, dab, dab, pecked the cock.

“Now! has anybody else got anything to say on the subject?”

But nobody had.  So he flew up on to the wall, and cried
“Cock-a-doodle-doo!”

[Illustration]

A WEEK SPENT IN A GLASS POND.

BY THE GREAT WATER-BEETLE.

Very few beetles have ever seen a Glass Pond.  I once spent a week in one, and though I think, with good management, and in society suitably selected, it may be a comfortable home enough, I advise my water-neighbours to be content with the pond in the wood.

The story of my brief sojourn in the Glass Pond is a story with a moral, and it concerns two large classes of my fellow-creatures:  those who live in ponds and—­those who don’t.  If I do not tell it, no one else will.  Those connected with it who belong to the second class (namely, Francis, Molly, and the learned Doctor, their grandfather) will not, I am sure.  And as to the rest of us, there is none left but—­

However, that is the end of my tale, not the beginning.

The beginning, as far as I am concerned, was in the Pond.  It is very difficult to describe a pond to people who cannot live under water, just as I found it next door to impossible to make a minnow I knew believe in dry land.  He said, at last, that perhaps there might be some little space beyond the pond in hot weather, when the water was low; and that was the utmost that he would allow.  But of all cold-blooded unconvinceable creatures, the most obstinate are fish.

Men are very different.  They do not refuse to believe what lies beyond their personal experience.  I respected the learned Doctor, and was really sorry for the disadvantages under which he laboured.  That a creature of his intelligence should have only two eyes, and those not even compound ones—­that he should not be able to see under water or in the dark—­that he should not only have nothing like six legs, but be quite without wings, so that he could not even fly out of his own window for a turn in the air on a summer’s evening—­these drawbacks made me quite sorry for him; for he had none of the minnow’s complacent ignorance.  He knew my advantages as well as I knew them myself, and bore me no ill-will for them.