MARGARET BERTHA WRIGHT.

BIRDS OF A TEXAN WINTER.

White of Selborne was, on the whole, tolerably content to plunge his swallows, or a good proportion of them, into the mud and deposit them for the winter at the bottom of a pond.  Professionally conservative, as a fine old Church-of-England clergyman, though constitutionally sceptical, as became one of the earliest of really observant naturalists, he was loath to break flatly with the consensus of contemporary opinion, rustic and philosophic, and found a modus vivendi in the theory that a great many, perhaps a majority, of the swifts and barn-swallows did go to Africa.  He had seen them organizing their emigration-parties and holding noisy debate over the best time to start and the best route to take.  The sea-part of the travel was of trifling length, and baiting-places were plenty in France, Spain, and Italy.  Sometimes, such was their power of wing, they were known to take the outside route and strike boldly across the Bay of Biscay, for they had alighted on vessels.  Probably the worthy old man was reluctant to wrench from the rural mind a harmless remnant of superstition,—­if superstition it might be called, in view of the fact that sundry saurians and chelonians, held by classifiers to be superior in rank to birds, do hibernate under water, and that, more marvellous than all, the quarrymen of his day, like those of ours, insisted that living frogs occasionally sprang from under their chisel, leaving an unchallengeable impress in the immemorial rock.  It must indeed have been up-hill work to extinguish the old belief in the minds of men who had seen the water-ouzel pattering in perfect ease and comfort along the floor of the pellucid pool, and who had heard from their fisher friends from the north coast of the gannets that were drawn up in the herring-nets.

Most of us, even color chi sanno, like to retain a spice of mystery in our mental food.  It may constitute no part of the nutriment, and may often be deleterious, but it meets a want, somehow or other, and wants, however undefinable, must be recognized.  It is a spur that titillates the absorbent surfaces and helps to keep them in action.  It is a craving that the race is never going to outlive, and that will afford occupation and subsistence to a considerable class of its most intelligent and respectable members until the year one million, as it has done since the year one.  The great mass of us like to see the absolute reign of reason tempered by the incomprehensible, and are ever ready to lend a kindly ear to men and things that humor that liking.