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
th