ut
the Red Indians that he thought it more prudent to create this place of
strength. As the Red Indians are in North America, and this fort seems
to me a very useless kind of building, I am anxious to hope that the two
may never be brought together. When Austin is not engaged in building
forts, nor on his lessons, which are just as annoying to him as other
children's lessons are to them, he walks sometimes in the bush, and if
anybody is with him, talks all the time. When he is alone I don't think
he says anything, and I dare say he feels very lonely and frightened,
just as the lean man does, at the queer noises and the endless lines of
the trees. He finds the strangest kinds of seeds, some of them bright
coloured like lollipops, or really like precious stones; some of them in
odd cases like tobacco-pouches. He finds and collects all kinds of
little shells with which the whole ground is scattered, and which,
though they are the shells of land animals like our snails, are nearly
of as many shapes and colours as the shells on our sea-beaches. In the
streams that come running down out of the mountains, and which are all
as clear and bright as mirror glass, he sees eels and little bright fish
that sometimes jump together out of the surface of the brook in a little
knot of silver, and fresh-water prawns which lie close under the stones,
and can be seen looking up at him with eyes of the colour of a jewel. He
sees all kinds of beautiful birds, some of them blue and white, some of
them blue and white and red, and some of them coloured like our pigeons
at home, and these last the little girls in the cellar may like to know
live almost entirely on nutmegs as they fall ripe off the trees. Another
little bird he may sometimes see, as the lean man saw him only this
morning, a little fellow not so big as a man's hand, exquisitely neat,
of a pretty bronze black like ladies' shoes, and who sticks up behind
him (much as a peacock does) his little tail shaped and fluted like a
scallop shell.

Here are a lot of curious and interesting things that Austin sees round
him every day; and when I was a child at home in the old country I used
to play and pretend to myself that I saw things of the same kind. That
the rooms were full of orange and nutmeg trees, and the cold town
gardens outside the windows were alive with parrots and with lions. What
do the little girls in the cellar think that Austin does? He makes
believe just the other way: he p