And apply the consideration more publicly:  do you imagine the Prince of Wales will be the same sort of king if, when he comes to the throne, he calls himself King Albert Edward in florid Continental fashion, instead of “Edward the Seventh,” with a right hope that an Edward the Eighth may follow after him, to make a neck-and-neck race of it with the Henries?  I don’t know anything that would do more to knit up the English constitution:  but whenever I pass the Albert Memorial I tremble lest filial piety will not allow the thing to be done.

Now of all this I had an instance in the village the day before yesterday.  At the corner house by the post-office, as I went by, a bird opened his bill and sang a note, and down, down, down, down he went over a golden scale:  pitched afresh, and dropped down another; and then up, up, up, over the range of both.  Then he flung back his shaggy head and laughed.  “In all my father’s realm there are no such bells as these!” It was the laughing jackass.  “Who gave you your name?” “My godfathers and my godmothers in my baptism.”  Well, his will have that to answer for, however safely for the rest he may have eschewed the world, the flesh, and the devil.  Poor bird, to be set to sing to us under such a burden:—­of which, unconscious failure, he knows nothing.

Here I have remembered for you a bit of a poem that took hold of me some while ago and touched on the same unkindness:  only here the flower is conscious of the wrong done to it, and looks forward to a day of juster judgment:—­

    “What have I done?—­Man came
     (There’s nothing that sticks like dirt),
     Looked at me with eyes of blame,
     And called me ‘Squinancy-wort!’
     What have I done?  I linger
     (I cannot say that I live)
     In the happy lands of my birth;
     Passers-by point with the finger: 
     For me the light of the sun
     Is darkened.  Oh, what would I give
     To creep away, and hide my shame in the earth! 
     What have I done? 
     Yet there is hope.  I have seen
     Many changes since I began. 
     The web-footed beasts have been
     (Dear beasts!)—­and gone, being part of some wider plan. 
     Perhaps in His infinite mercy God will remove this man!”

Now I am on sentiment and unjust judgments:  here is another instance, where evidently in life I did not love well enough a character nobler than this capering and accommodating boy Benjy, who toadies to all my moods.  Calling at the lower farm, I missed him whom I used to nickname “Manger,” because his dog-jaws always refused to smile on me.  His old mistress gave me a pathetic account of his last days.  It was the muzzling order that broke his poor old heart.  He took it as an accusation on a point where, though of a melancholy disposition, his reputation had been spotless.  He never lifted his head nor smiled again.  And not all his mistress’ love could explain to him that he was not in fault.  She wept as she told it me.