iliarly call him John). I petted Calvin. I lavished upon him an
enthusiastic fondness. I told him that he had no fault; that the one
action that I had called a vice was an heroic exhibition of regard for
my interest. I bade him go and do likewise continually. I now saw how
much better instinct is than mere unguided reason. Calvin knew. If he
had put his opinion into English (instead of his native catalogue), it
would have been, "You need not teach your grandmother to suck eggs." It
was only the round of nature. The worms eat a noxious something in the
ground. The birds eat the worms. Calvin eats the birds. We eat--no, we
do not eat Calvin. There the chain stops. When you ascend the scale of
being, and come to an animal that is, like ourselves, inedible, you have
arrived at a result where you can rest. Let us respect the cat: he
completes an edible chain.

I have little heart to discuss methods of raising peas. It occurs to me
that I can have an iron pea-bush, a sort of trellis, through which I
could discharge electricity at frequent intervals and electrify the
birds to death when they alight; for they stand upon my beautiful bush
in order to pick out the peas. An apparatus of this kind, with an
operator, would cost, however, about as much as the peas. A neighbor
suggests that I might put up a scarecrow near the vines, which would
keep the birds away. I am doubtful about it; the birds are too much
accustomed to seeing a person in poor clothes in the garden to care much
for that. Another neighbor suggests that the birds do not open the pods;
that a sort of blast, apt to come after rain, splits the pods, and the
birds then eat the peas. It may be so. There seems to be complete unity
of action between the blast and the birds. But good neighbors, kind
friends, I desire that you will not increase, by talk, a disappointment
which you cannot assuage.

CROWDED

Chauncey Depew says: In the Berkshire Hills there was a funeral, and as
the friends and mourners gathered in the little parlor, there came the
typical New England female who mingles curiosity with her sympathy, and,
as she glanced around the darkened room, she said to the bereaved widow:

"Where did you get that new eight-day clock?"

"We ain't got no new eight-day clock," was the reply.

"You ain't? What's that in the corner there?"

"Why, no, that's not an eight-day clock; that's the deceased. We stood
him on end to make room for the mourners."

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