in exchange the
right to wear trousers, to drive an omnibus, or to wear a policeman's
uniform! Do you think that they will listen to you? No,--not even the
respectable members of the second class. The Cinderellas with no glass
slippers and no protecting fairy might join with you, if they did not
look up to the first class as their rulers and models. They feel
instinctively that the glory of the Angelidae illuminates even them; and
they all, or almost all, have a faint yet abiding and comforting hope
that some unheard-of miracle, or yet undiscovered cosmetic, may place
them among the blessed.

You cannot, my dear Hipparchia, by any process of teaching, not even by
magazine-articles, make a canary-bird into a useful barn-door fowl. It
will wear yellow feathers, and it will sing and nibble at sugar.

SCARABAEI ED ALTRI.

Down by the sands, where the midland sea surges and draws off its feeble
tides, and the sheltering beaches, the delight of antique mariners,
tempt straying ruminants with their salt herbage, and no voracious
spring-tide floods the beach, I made my first positive acquaintance with
the _Scarabaeus pilularius_, and guessed at the mystery of his worship in
those Eastern lands where sand and sun are the rulers, and he their
chief subject. Wonderful in his knowledge of statics and dynamics I
found him; heroic in fight and magnanimous in victory, as ungrudging in
his acceptance of defeat; and altogether a creature of rare and
wonderful instincts.

A line of tracks, so similar to hieroglyphics as to justify an
initiatory reverence in a Cadmian mind, drawn indefinitely across the
smooth-spread yellow sand, led me, curious, to the arena of his
achievements. A dozen similar tracks led from different directions,
converging to a pile of dung, and here half a dozen Scarabaei, of as many
sizes, were cutting and carving, and every now and then another came
buzzing up from the leeward, flying in the eye of the wind, and dropped
heavily on the sand, ready to make one of the busy crowd. I selected as
subject of my observations the largest, a fellow of prodigious
proportions and exemplary industry. He had commenced the excavation of a
mass of the pilulary, making a circular cut downwards, and was half
buried in the fosse which was to isolate a sufficient fragment. Round
and round he went in a perfect arc, cutting deeper and deeper until he
reached the sand below and the separation was complete. He traversed it
to