bodies of unburied men” than are children to the bodies of mice and birds.  Here the ghost of no creature haunts reproaching us with the absence of a tomb, as the dead sailor washed up on an alien shore reproaches us so often in the pages of The Greek Anthology.  There is a procession to the grave and all due ceremony.  There is even a funeral service.  Over the starling, perhaps, it lacked something in appropriateness.  The buriers meant well however.  Their favourite in verse at the time was Lars Porsena of Clusium, and they gave the starling the best they knew—­gave it to him from beginning to end.  What he made of it, there is no telling:  he is, it is said an impressionable bird, though something of a satirist.  Someone, overhearing them, recommended a briefer and more fitting service for the future.  The young thrush had the benefit of the advice.  He was laid to his last rest with the recitation of that noblest of valedictories:  “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,” over his tomb.  He is now gone where there is no cat or parent to disturb.  The priests who buried him declare that he has been turned into a golden nightingale, and that there must be no noise or romping in the garden for three days, as not till then will he have arrived safely at the Appleiades.  That is the name they give to the Pleiades—­the seven golden islands whither pass the souls of dead mice and birds and dolls and where Scarlatti lives and where you, too, may expect to go if you please them.  Even the black cat will probably go there—­one’s own black cat.  But not the neighbour’s cat—­the reddish-brown one—­thief, murderer and beast.  It is the neighbour’s cat that makes one believe there is a hell.

Short is the memory of man, however.  Shorter the memory of children.  There is no gloom that can withstand May pouring itself out in the deep blue of anchusa and the paler blue of lupin, gushing out in the yellow of laburnum, tossing like the tides in the wind.  One is gloomy, perhaps, when one looks at the lettuces and sees how slow is their growth.  Watching a plant grow is like watching a kettle boil.  It seems to take æons.  The patience of gardeners always astonishes me.  Were gardening my profession, I should spend half my time inventing schemes for making plants grow up in a night like Jonah’s gourd.  I should not mind about parsnips.  A parsnip might mature as slowly as an oak and live as long for all I care.  There is something, it may be, to be said for parsnips, as there is something, it may be, to be said for Mr Bonar Law.  But I do not know it.  They do not even tempt the slugs and the leather-jackets away from the lettuces.  There is nothing that puzzles one more in a friend than if he confesses to a taste for parsnips.  Immediately, a gulf yawns deeper than could be caused by any confession of religious or moral eccentricity.  One’s sympathies instinctively close up like a sea-anemone touched by a child’s finger.  Yet people eat them.  All that you and I know about