ng and screaming about, and seems agitated as if
possessed. The father of the flock has also a considerable vocabulary;
if he finds food, he calls a favourite concubine to partake; and if a
bird of prey passes over, with a warning voice he bids his family beware.
The gallant chanticleer has at command his amorous phrases and his terms
of defiance. But the sound by which he is best known is his crowing: by
this he has been distinguished in all ages as the countryman's clock or
larum, as the watchman that proclaims the divisions of the night. Thus
the poet elegantly styles him:

" . . . the crested cock, whose clarion sounds
The silent hours."

A neighbouring gentleman one summer had lost most of his chickens by a
sparrow-hawk, that came gliding down between a faggot pile and the end of
his house to the place where the coops stood. The owner, inwardly vexed
to see his flock thus diminished, hung a setting-net adroitly between the
pile and the house, into which the caitiff dashed and was entangled.
Resentment suggested the law of retaliation; he therefore clipped the
hawk's wings, cut off his talons, and, fixing a cork on his bill, threw
him down among the brood-hens. Imagination cannot paint the scene that
ensued; the expressions that fear, rage, and revenge inspired, were new,
or at least such as had been unnoticed before: the exasperated matrons
upbraided, they execrated, they insulted, they triumphed. In a word,
they never desisted from buffeting their adversary till they had torn him
in a hundred pieces.

LETTER XLIV.

" . . . Monstrent
* * * * *
Quid tantum Oceano properent se tingere soles
Hyberni; vel quae tardis mora noctibus obstet."

SELBORNE.

Gentlemen who have outlets might contrive to make ornament subservient to
utility: a pleasing eye-trap might also contribute to promote science: an
obelisk in a garden or park might be both an embellishment and an
heliotrope.

Any person that is curious, and enjoys the advantage of a good horizon,
might, with little trouble, make two heliotropes; the one for the winter,
the other for the summer solstice: and the two erections might be
constructed with very little expense; for two pieces of timber
frame-work, about ten or twelve feet high, and four feet broad at the
base, and close lined with plank, would answer the purpose.

The erection for the former should, if possible, be placed within sight
of some window in the common sittin