esently the poor
wretch was straightened out and started.... It really was very funny,
and I no longer wondered at the heartless mirth of the onlookers. A pea
on a drumhead is a restful object in comparison with Watson on that
ice-hill. His sledge seemed determined from the first moment to rid
itself of the unfortunate man clinging to it; it went everywhere and
sampled every obstacle, and it shot him eventually, as it had shot me,
into a snowheap, with one Chinese lantern twisted by its strings round
his neck, and another, held by the post, in his hand. Watson did not
know how they got there.

Watson and I solemnly shook hands; we were the gladiators of the
occasion, and sympathised with one another. Three or four times did we
suffer for the delight of the crowd; after that we began to become
uninteresting to them, partly because we had carried away all the
Chinese lanterns, and partly because we had begun to learn the art.

MORNING.

'Hullo!' the Blackbird carolled.
'Hullo!' the Woods replied,
'The sun that set in the West last night
Comes up on the other side.'

'Wake! wake!' the Starling chattered,
'For the hand of rising day
Has gripped one edge of the blanket night
And is rolling it all away.'

'Up! up!' the Robin whistled,
'For the Lady Dawn, so bright,
Has come to the broad, dark face of earth,
And is washing it all with light.'

'Out! out!' sang the joyous chorus:
'With a hand of magic care,
She's been to the nooks and corners dark
And scrubbed out the shadows there.'

And then upon snowy pillows
There glittered the blinking sun,
And a thousand thousand eyes awoke
To another day begun.

PEEPS INTO NATURE'S NURSERIES.

XI.--NURSERIES IN THE BIRD-WORLD.

Our survey of Nature's babies so far has been a fairly extensive one,
and many readers of _Chatterbox_ have shown that they were impressed
with the fact that in every case these have come into the world in a
form quite unlike that of their parents. And they have probably also
noticed that where this unlikeness was most striking, there, as a
general rule, these young had to shift for themselves from the moment
they were able to move. Though the majority of these young creatures are
to be found in or around the coasts of Great Britain, many are difficult
to obtain, and only in a very few cases have we met with any display of
care on the part of the parents for t