From Macmillan's Magazine.
WHEN WE WERE BOYS.

II.

strictly prohibited. Once, in a pepper famine, we tried salt as an alternative. It was to a starling's skin that we applied it; that starling's skin kept

WHEN we were boys we used to find that each season of the year was de-moist, as the day it was stripped, all fined by its appropriate pursuits and duties just as clearly as if we had been

farmers.

through the summer and to the following winter, when we threw it away; if any fragment of it be yet in existence In the spring a boy's time is so we are morally certain that it is moist occupied with bird-nesting in all its still. Salt is useless. Pepper, on the branches, such as finding the nests, other hand, if it be well rubbed in, is climbing the trees, taking the nestlings, good for a long while; but in the end blowing the eggs and classifying them, its effect wears off and the moth will that he is left little leisure for other corrupt the skin notwithstanding. things. In the high summer he will After a month or two of the practice be occupied in pursuing - whether it of taxidermy with the assistance of be butterflies with a net, or, failing pepper, the vigilance of the authorities that, a cap, or the immature fledglings began to tire, and we began with poiof the year, escaped from the nests sons in the shape of corrosive subliwhich he has spared, and giving him mate. We do not recommend it; it is reasonable hopes of a successful issue so liquid that its use is attended with to expeditions with catapult or other inconvenience. Arsenical soap is far missile engines. The long autumn better for a boy; it does not spill, and evenings will be his opportunity for if a thing can be spilled, a boy will spill practising his taxidermy, for skinning it. and stuffing the birds which have lately fallen to his snares or weapons.

As good-luck would have it, our house was far larger than our needs; Surely a very special providence so when once we had settled on a watches over the boy, and above all scantily furnished room down a little over the boy who occupies his business used passage, and had made it our own with bird-stuffing. In the first place, by garnishing it with the skins of the and before more subtle dangers come birds and the peculiar flavor of taxito be enumerated, he will of necessity dermy and preservatives, no one cared have to work with a very sharp cutting to dispute such an excellent title. It tool. If one spoke of the knife, with was left in our undisturbed possession, which we skinned our birds, by that scarcely troubled even by a housemaid. monosyllabic name we were virtuously Indeed we had so far won over the indignant; it was a scalpel. Then, if housemaid whose duty it was to keep a boy escaped the risk of lockjaw, or this room in the order which is duty's other serious results of a cut from the ideal, that far from combating our knife when it was clean, by how many messes she even aided and abetted times was his danger from incisions them by bringing us raw meat from the multiplied when that knife had become kitchen for the young birds, or hardencrusted with the blood of a succes-boiled eggs to chop up for those who sion of victims, cleaned from it accord-needed more delicate diet. This room ing to a boy's idea of cleansing? And if the operator were miraculously preserved, and survived this danger from the microbes of decomposition, there remained the yet more positive peril incurred in the handling of the poisons which must necessarily be used in curing the skins. At the first, it is true, we had to do all our curing with pepper and camphor; poisons were

was a perpetual joy, for here we could keep all the live creatures and dead trophies banished by Authority from our bedroom, such as the skins of the bigger birds, which boyish fingers had not scraped with sufficient care in the nooks and crannies- rather gruesome objects, in the eye of any but a boy, but which, according to his verdict "will be all right in a day or two, when

they have dried." These, tyrannical Its infantile notes give little promise, Authority, acting on a specious plea of and he has to believe that this creature regard for health, forbade from remain- which constantly declines its food, ing in a bed-chamber. The same which has to be tempted and cherished power, on a similar plea, fixed a limit like a malade imaginaire, will reward to the number of live birds which were all these cares by glorious song in the permitted to share the bed-chamber of ensuing spring. But the jackdaw boyhood. It was necessary that sun- makes him no promises, raises no false dry of them should be consigned at hopes, begins on the note which will nightfall, in company with the uncer- last him all his life through for extain skins, to the less honorable room pressing his gladness in living and the on the ground floor. Here, too, lived a joy of oatmeal. family of white mice, in constant apprehensions at the spasmodic movements of a young thrush who, piping juvenilely and fed from time to time on oatmeal, inhabited a wicker cage at their side. From a packing-case, on the floor, fronted with lathes nailed so as to leave inch-wide interstices, two young jackdaws said “Jack!" all day long and most of the night; an exclamation only to be appeased by oatmeal thrust so far down the gaping throat that there seemed a danger of the finger being lost irrecoverably. Unvaried oatmeal was the food of the nursling jackdaw, which perhaps accounts for the monotony of its note; whereas the thrush's food might from time to time, on Joe's permission (Joe was the coachman's boy), be relieved by small junks of raw meat. There is a comfort, however, about the solid merit of a jackdaw which contrasts favorably with the more pretentious manners of the young thrush. The jackdaw sits and says "Jack," and does not pretend to say anything else, consumes its simple food with gratitude, and is contented with one perch through a whole summer's day. We used to put them out in a great elm-tree by the gate of the stable-yard, and there they would sit all through the afternoon in perfect happiness. The young thrushes were always restless, dissatisfied, their tails draggly, jumping about as if they had hysterics, pining, getting caught by cats, a perpetual thorn in a boy's flesh. There is nothing so analogous to the care of them, in the experience of later life, as coloring a meerschaum pipe. Moreover, the rearing of a songster is a constant tax on a boy's faith.

It was neither in the garden nor in the wood that we found our jackdaws. When one has left the low-lying marshy house of the moor-hen, and the lane with its crumbly wall beloved of the blue-tits, one may proceed to climb up through the alternate shades and sunshines of the wood which was our great bird-nesting preserve. The woodargus will flit before us across the sunlit spaces, the fritillary glance over the flashing bracken, and finally we may arrive panting and perspiring at the head of the hillside. Here is a bank, with a wonderful tangle of bramble and honeysuckle over which the bees are humming and the little blue butterflies coming and going, like gems, from the field of lucerne beyond it. But when one climbs up the gap in the bank one looks forth over a scene which at once takes the eye from all the nearer objects. At two miles' distance twinkle the waves of the Bristol Channel, and the bay over which Mrs. Leigh looked so long for the coming of the good ship Rose. The cliffs on which the waves of that sea thundered were the jackdaws' home; they were two miles from our home, and every bush and every turn of the road in that two mile ramble was full of its own associations. At the angle of the lane which led from our house to the highroad a little stream creeps out on to the great thoroughfare, moist even in the dryest weather. Once, in a dry spring, peeping cautiously round the corner, we had seen a little covey of housemartins settled in the oozy mud which that tiny rivulet afforded, an oasis in the midst of surrounding dryness. They were busy collecting mud for the

nests which they built beneath the backed shrike would fly out and go eaves. We stole back, for a stone; before us, much as the yellow-hammer the martins saw the quick movement of had done, but with longer flights and the arm, and rose as the stone came to greater shyness, now and again rattling them, but it glanced from the ground out his anger at our intrusion. The at an angle beyond the calculation of hedges here were a very high and thick any house-martin, and, on its ricochet, tangle of brambles and wild-growing caught one of the birds from beneath. things. Somewhere among them was It fell dead, and we rushed out in tri- the shrike's nest, doubtless, but it umph to secure it, with a joy which no never happened to us to find it, though rocketing pheasant, cleanly killed, can we searched often and long. After bring to a grown sportsman's heart. this all road and hedges ceased, and we It was so beautiful with its dark steel- seemed to be coming to the world's blue back and snowy patch over the end, for there were no houses nor any tail and white under parts! Then the sign of cultivation-only, on our left, way led on past the home of a great a high rising hillside of gorse, and on friend of ours who owned a single- the right, the sea whose cliffs rose ever barrelled gun, and under the shade more steeply as we went on. At two of great elm-trees, where once, for a fields' distance or so we would see rabwhole summer, we had been in the bits sitting out on the short-nibbled habit of seeing a chaffinch, with three grass which grew on the narrowing or four white feathers in his tail, but level stretch between the furzy hillside had never been able to secure him. and the cliffs; but before we came Thereafter the road led off to the left, within measurable distance of them and we were soon on high ground, they were gone, into the gorse or to whence we could see the sea sparkling their holes in the cliffside. But by on our right, and where we scarcely this time we would have seen many ever failed to put up a yellow-hammer jackdaws passing us overhead, going to whose habit was to go on along the or from their nests in the cliffs; the hedge before us in a succession of short flights, perching continually on the top of some low bush, and sending to us his plaintive song on two notes. We could rely on him to furnish us sport in this fashion for a quarter of a mile of our road; then he would tire

clamor of many voices, joining in the simple chorus of "Jack!" would be reaching us, and soon, peering over the edge of the cliff, we would see them coming and going like bees round a hive.

By this time, too, they would be of our persecutions and turn back, growing aware of our approach, and low-flying, towards the place from the clamor would increase by way of which we had started him. Thence protest, a protest which broke forth ten the way began to bend downwards. times more clamorous when we rolled We had left all houses behind us, and a stone down rattling among their went between steep, gorse-clad banks homes; then their cries would grow with little in them that made sport for deafening. From among them a dark us. Occasionally we would see a wren thing would sometimes sweep out like creeping so close in the thick golden- an arrow over the sea, as our stone blossomed bushes as to be almost invis- went down the cliff; and at the same ible; or a yellow-hammer would perch moment a shrill, piercing cry would on their tops, utter his notes once, and come from high above our heads. The then away whither we did not care to dark arrow would slant upwards follow him through the prickly thicket; towards the cry, and as the light of the or a thrush would rise from grubbing sun caught it we would see it to be a at the foot of a bush and elude us in hen kestrel who had darted out from like manner. Presently we reached her cliff-home and gone aloft to remonthe lower ground where, from a little strate together with her spouse, on this grove of small roadside elms, a red-invasion of their domesticity.

The kestrel's nest was rather beyond | and beating around our heads as the our hopes. We could see it, a bigger Furies pursued and hunted Orestes. heap of sticks than any that the jack-But our hard little hearts were deaf to daws had gathered, perched on a pin- the pathos of the mutual cries, and denacle of cliff inaccessible equally from lightedly we bore off the youngsters above or from below. The sole means who, sooth to say, soon accepted their of getting to it appeared to be by a rope orphanhood and their foster parents from the top; but though we often with something like Oriental philosdiscussed the project of lowering each ophy. They would sit all day on the other over we never put it into effect bough of the great elm-tree on which by reason of the providential absence we had put them, outside the doors of of a suitable rope. So at the kestrels the stable yard, contented so long as we could only look and wonder as at they might intermittently say “Jack!” something beyond our best ambitions. and have frequent globules of pasty In the mean time we found sufficient oatmeal thrust down their gullets. danger and delight in scrambling about We have said that we never sucthe shaly cliff in search of the more ceeded in taking the kestrels from accessible jackdaws' nests. One would these cliffs; but, for all that, we had be on a niche or platform of the cliff's more than one young kestrel as a pet, face, another in the mouth of a hole the gift of a connection by marriage of which a rabbit had deserted for a more | Joe's brother, who was "summat in convenient dwelling. We found them the gaming way," a phrase which in all ages and stages; youngsters might mean a gambler or a gamealmost able to fly, newly hatched keeper, but, in its real sense, as we nakednesses with hardly the rudiments have reason to believe, signified a of tails, eggs hard set and eggs newly poacher. They were wild-eyed caplaid. And all the while that we were tives, these beautiful creatures, with taking this census of the younger popu- the richest chestnut plumage melting lation the old ones would be sweeping around us, almost brushing us with their wings and threatening, with exclamations of "Jack!" in the most menacing key, to send us hurtling down into the waters beneath. Indeed, it would have taken but a little impetus to do this, for the cliff was of slaty shillet, bound here and there by tussocks and platforms of grass or by tufts of the sea-pink. The shillet slipped from beneath our feet and gave a very insecure hold, but our nerve was perfect and the schoolboy's special providence protected us, in which saying likely enough there is some tautology. Above, the shillet still cropped up from the yellow grass, and was the well-beloved basking place of grayling butterflies who would rest in-members of the corvine family, as jackvisible on the grey lichen-grown boulders. But we recked little of them when our hands, our pockets, our caps were full of young jackdaws crying piteously "Jack!"; to which cries We had been told that starlings would the parents responded with deeper notes in the same sense, pursuing us

into the most delicate pearl-ash grey. They were not always thus. When they came to us they were little balls of grey fluff, but even then with an eye that was a thing to wonder at and a beak which cleft chasms out of our small fingers. Their demeanor alternated between passionate struggles for freedom and an air of sullen indifference, but they always in either mood showed a healthy appetite for their raw meat. We have heard that the experience of others has been more fortunate; but, so far as our knowledge of them went, we had no joy of kestrels in captivity.

Of all birds which we tried in captivity ("as pets," we used to call it, for euphony), none were so successful as

daws, magpies, and that small relation of the crows, the starling. None of them ever talked, though their education was the passion of our young lives.

talk only when their tongues had been cleft by a sharp sixpence; but we

could never bring ourselves to the which abode in his wicked grey eye. point of performing the operation, and For mo ths he was to us a pure joy, — moreover sixpences were rare. But to the gardeners a joy not altogether the starling, though he did not talk unmi ed, for he was forever playing with the tongues of men, was forever harlequin to their pantaloon. Like chattering, invincibly cheerful though most practical jokers, he erred in going he lived in a cage. The jackdaws did too far. One day he amused himself not live in a cage, yet their cheerful- most excellently in uprooting a clump ness was not in proportion to their of geraniums just bedded out. He was wider liberty, — the liberty of the quite fearless, and it did not occur to clipped wing. They, however, we his free spirit to obliterate his threewere pleased to think, did talk. True pronged footmarks on the newly turned they said but the one word "Jack ! " | earth. Clipped in the wing as he was, but they said it very often; there could he was always a little too fleet for the be no mistake about their mastery of best of human pursuers. It was a it, and we longed for the time when strange shambling, side-long progress, the years, bringing the philosophic aided by short flights of a few yards at mind, should add wisdom and variety a time, when his wing had not been to their tones. In youth they were a lately pruned; but it generally served monotonous rusty black, as monoto-him well enough to take him to some nous as their language and as their low-branched tree, and once there no manners, for, after all, the jackdaw is deficient in social talent; his virtues are sterling and respectable, but he does not charm.

man had a chance of catching him. It needed extraordinary ingenuity to capture him for his periodical clipping, for his cunning was greater even than his agility. Altogether he had fared far better than most of our pets, and we looked on him quite as a permanent fixture and a perpetual joy, but two days after his little joke with the geraniums he was missing. We called for him and sought him high and low, in all his favorite haunts, but we never heard again the chuckling response with which he was wont to greet us. To this day his fate remains veiled in the deepest mystery, only - we make no specific charge against any one — but it is significant that his disappearance should have followed so closely on his exploit with the geraniums. After all it was but a little matter. What would they have said if we had had for a pet Charles Dickens's raven which ate up a grand piano and the greater part of the front staircase ?

Of all pets that ever we kept, the most charming, certainly, was the magpie. It was full of varying moods and humors, truly; but none of them in the least akin to melancholy, whereas the normal disposition of the jackdaws was undoubtedly sombre. At times the magpie was as gay as the starling himself; but he did not exhibit the same unreasonable and wearisome cheerfulness. If he had been shut up in a cage which wore out his tailfeathers, he would have bitten the wicker bars to splinters. He was capable of very genuine anger, and inexhaustible in his ingenuity for mischief. His shape and movement, and the bright motley of his plumage, were a joy to the eye; he was a Cavalier to the jackdaw's Puritan. The starling was handsome enough, with the sheen of his green and purple-mottled back, We never had a raven. We used to but you had to come close to his cage see ravens sometimes flying high above to appreciate him. The magpie at- those cliffs in which we found the jacktracted you from afar, only gaining daws' nests. We knew, -as boys do added grace on a closer view which know things, of their inner consciousrevealed a gloss of gayer colors on ness or some other unimpeachable teswhat affar off had looked like black; timony (as a matter of fact we think a near view was required, too, to recog- Joe had said so)- that ravens did nize the unspeakable spirit of mischief actually nest further along in those