Bude Haven on the other. Also, our last long dreamy drive; in the mild September sunshine, across the twenty-one miles of sparsely inhabited country which lie between Tintagel and Launceston. In the midst of it, on the top of a high flat of moorland, our driver turned round and pointed with his whip to a long low mound, faintly visible about half-a-mile off. "There, ladies, that's King Arthur's grave."

These varied records of the hero's last resting-place remind one of the three heads, said to be still extant, of Oliver Cromwell, one when he was a little boy, one as a young man, and the third as an old man!

But after all my last and vividest recollection of King Arthur's country is that wild sail-so wild that I wished I had taken it alone-in the solitary boat, up and down the tossing, waves in face of Tintagel rock; the dark, iron-bound coast with its awful caves, the bright sunshiny land, and ever threatening

rises over the blackness of darkness like & morning star.

If Arthur could "come again "—perhaps in one of the descendants of a prince who was not unlike him, who lived and died among us in this nineteenth century— very "Wearing the white flower of a blameless life

if this could be--what a blessing for Arthur's beloved England!

L'ENVOI

Written more than a year after. The "old hen" and her chickens have long been safe at home. A dense December fog creeps in everywhere, choking and blinding, as I finish the history of those sixteen innocent days, calm as autumn, and bright as spring, when we three took our Unsentimental Journey together through Cornwall. Many a clever critic, like Sir Charles Coldstream when he looked into the crater of Vesuvius, may see "nothing in it," a few kindly readers looking a little further, may see a little more probably the writer only sees the whole.

But such as it is, let it stay-simple memorial of what Americans would call "a good time," the sunshine of which may cast its brightness far forward, even into that quiet time "when travelling days are done."

FOR several years during which the writer of the following pages occupied apartments in a Worcestershire farmhouse, the mantelshelf of his sitting room was adorned with the stuffed and mounted teguments of a tiny animal well-known to farmers and gamekeepers, and belonging to a class usually arranged in the rustic mind under the comprehensive title of vermin.

The variety of British quadrupeds strictly feræ naturæ is not so great that much uncertainty might be assumed to exist among educated persons as to the outward characteristics of the different species; but it seems that the education of schools is not that which teaches a boy to distinguish "a hawk from a hernshaw," and this is doubtless the reason why one learned visitor from the neighbouring town vaguely opined that my little chimney ornament "might be " a rat, while another, in view of its ruddy brown coat and white shirt-front, hazarded the bold guess that it was a squirrel! The learning and intelligence of both my friends were at fault; the little bright-eyed beastie was simply a weasel.

Our country cousins, whose general culture

and mental acquirements we of the towns are

not prone to over-value, have usually the laugh on their side

ROBBING A FLYCATCHER'S NEST. Drawn by BRYAN HOOK.

when it comes to a question, not of booklearning in the common sense, but of a knowledge of the one book which lies open always, whose pages are the heath and the. hedgerow, the vales and the running brooks. Animals and birds whose forms and habits have been familiar to the rustic from the time of his earliest recollection, the townbred youth has only seen represented in pictures, or at best in the taxidermist's window. There are very many intelligent and cultivated persons who have never seen a kingfisher, a squirrel, or a dormouse in its natural haunts, though the two latter are familiar enough as domestic pets. And those zoological collections, fixed or itinerant, in which we may so often find a splendid epitome of the natural history of other lands, generally take but little account of our own. The Frenchman who undertook to prepare a dissertation on camels, could at

least betake himself to the Jardin d'Acclimatation, and draw inspiration from a study of living specimens; the smaller denizens of our fields and copses are not deemed worthy to associate with foreign wonders, and must be sought in their native wilds by such as have the taste and the leisure for quiet rural pursuits.

Strange as the guesses of my urban friends appeared to me, their ignorance was perhaps not greater than might reasonably have been expected from men who had not been addicted to country life, nor to the study of natural history. To define pastern as "a horse's leg was the mistake, not of a mere Londoner, but of a man of acute observing powers, who was not wholly unaccustomed to travelling on horseback. And Johnson may have been capable of judging a horse, as well as, according to the story, he could sum up the points of a bull-dog, without being versed in all the terms of veterinary science. His frank explanation" ignorance, madam, sheer ignorance !"-might have been applied to several other definitions in which his zoological lore was found wanting, or in which his innate sagacity had formed no check upon the fabulous statements of others. Here, for example, is what the great lexicographer has to say concerning the tribe of mustelida.

There is only one of these descriptions that is even passably accurate, and its accuracy relates rather to what the animal does than to what it is. It is undeniably true that the polecat robs the hen-roost and warren, but so do the weasel, stoat, and ferret, whenever they have the opportunity. The epithet stinking, four times repeated, might have been extended to the weasel, which, like the rest of its tribe, has the power of emitting a horrible odour when chased or angry. When not under such excitement, even the polecat, of all its race the most formidably endowed in this respect, hardly deserves to be stigmatised in such wholesale fashion. That the weasel "kills mice" is, again, perfectly true, though it is but a very small portion of the whole truth; but the statement that it eats corn is probably founded

on a recollection of one of Æsop's Fables, in which the mouse and the weasel meet in a granary. Wherever there is corn, rats and mice may be looked for, and thus the neighbourhood of a granary supplies the weasel with a choice hunting-ground. The description of the ferret is superbly imaginative that ruthless exterminator of rats transformed into a monster were-rat, with flaming eyes and farreaching snout, endowed with fabulous powers of abducting his weaker brethren, as well as innocent rabbits. In extenuation of such lapses on the part of so laborious and conscientious a worker as Dr. Johnson, it must be borne in mind that in his time the facts of natural history had been very imperfectly investigated. The simple-minded Goldsmith. was able to allege some semblance of apocryphal authority in excuse of his marvellous dictum that cows, like deer, shed their horns annually.

Notwithstanding his well-earned character for bloodthirstiness, and the detestation with which he is regarded by the men in velveteens, I confess that the weasel is to me an attractive animal: and I am not sorry to learn upon good authority that in spite of snares and guns, his numbers do not greatly diminish. To the farmer who has cornstacks in his yard, the service rendered by the weasel in the destruction of rats and mice must far more than compensate for the occasional loss of eggs and chickens, though the slaughter of the latter, when it does occur, is too likely to be conducted upon a wholesale scale. The lithe and snake-like form, clear colouring, and agile movements of the little marauder, as it rustles through the dry autumnal leaves at the foot of the hedgerow, throwing backward glances full of saucy defiance from the security of its shelter, form a picture much more welcome to the eye of a lover of nature, than that of a barn door studded with the dead forms of jays, magpies, hawks, weasels, stoats, and other small creatures obnoxious to the prejudices of the gamekeeper the "Countryman's Museum," as White of Selbourne quaintly phrases it.

By country people the weasel and stoat are not uncommonly regarded as one and the same animal, the name of stoat being applied indiscriminately to either. The differences, however, are strongly marked, and one of them, the longer tail always tipped with black, which the stoat possesses, is obvious even at a distant glance. Then the weasel is not much more than half the size of its congener, and the female is often so extremely diminutive as to have given rise to an impression that there was another kind of weasel,

female weasels not greatly exceeding in bulk the large field-mouse or vole (arvicola arvalis). Another distinction between the weasel and the stoat is indicated by the colour of the throat and under parts, which in the former are pure white, and in the latter a dingy yellow, fading into white sometimes during the winter months, at which period also the rest of its coat, saving only the black tip of the tail, becomes either white or pied according to the severity of the season, or from other causes not ascertained. When the authoress of Adam Bede, in her exquisite description of that Sunday after

hardly accurate;

though the epithet would

have been correctly applied to a weasel, in which the contrast of colour is much more strongly marked.

As I have already hinted, Johnson was described the weasel as killing mice. These quite within the limits of truth when he are indeed its favourite food, but rats, moles, of song-birds, game, and the and eggs young