FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. 13

on young womanhood, which won the attention they deserved, makes it a characteristic of the "nymph" that (like Essper George) she can imitate the sounds of animals for the most part with wonderful accuracy, and that she is fond of all animals, and fears none. We see her passing through a field thronged with wild-looking cattle without the least hesitation, and making friends even with the yelping farm-dogs that come snapping and snarling at her heels. In winter she is to be seen feeding the wood-birds by flocks, and always taking care that the horses have a handful of corn or a lump of carrot when she goes to see them, and that the cows are the better for her visit by a bunch of lucerne or a fat fresh cabbage-leaf. “The house beasts show their pleasure when they hear her fleet footsteps on the paved yard; and her favourite pony whinnies to her in a peculiar voice as she passes his stable door. These are her friends, and their love for her is her reward." The Yolande of the Huguenot Family is prettily sketched, making friends with the whole stock at Corner Farm, till the great mild Juno eyes of the oxen look into hers with a familiar greeting, and the plaintive bleat of the sheep becomes an appeal for sympathy, instead of an utterance of terror; and the fancy sketch goes on to show her intent on coaxing the Norfolk hawk from the "holt" of ash and alder, the bittern from the "lode," the gulls and terns from the nearest "broad." No attentive reader of The Cloister and the Hearth, a book that requires and will repay more than one attentive reading, will have forgotten the hermit in his cave making friends of the little birds, and comforted in his great sorrow by their timely companionship, till his cell seemed illuminated by joy. A wonderful tamer too of animals, this Gerard Eliassoen,-of squirrels, hares, fawns; and in particular of one presumably untamable mule, supposed by the parish to be possessed with a devil. He encloses a paddock, from which he drives all the sons of Cain with threats of excommunication, for on this spot of ground there should be no murder, he resolved. He tames leverets and partridges, and little birds, and hares, and roe-deer. He finds a squirrel with a broken leg, which with infinite painstaking

he sets, and during the cure shows his patient repositories of acorns, nuts, chestnuts, etc.; and this squirrel gets well, and goes off, but returns to visit him in hard weather, and brings a mate, and next year little squirrels are found to have imbibed their parents' sentiments; and of all these animals each generation is tamer than the last; and herein is seen the clue to the triumphs of medieval hermits in taming wild animals.

What struck Darsie Latimer most in the domain of his excellent Quaker friend, Joshua Geddes, was the quantity and the tameness of the game. The hen partridge, as Miss Geddes and Darsie drew near, scarce abandoned the roost at the foot of the hedge where she had assembled her covey, though the path went close beside her; and the hare, remaining on her form, gazed at them as they passed, with her full dark eyes, or, rising lazily and hopping to a little distance, stood erect to look at them with more curiosity than apprehension. In answer to Darsie's expression of surprise at the extreme tameness of these shy and timid animals, Miss Geddes tells him that their confidence is the result of protection in the summer and relief during the winter. "They are pets," she said, "of my brother, who considers them as the better entitled to this kindness that they are a race persecuted by the world in general. He denieth himself," she added, even the company of a dog, that these creatures may here at least enjoy undisturbed security." Enjoy it accordingly they did; and in his enjoyed assurance of this, verily Joshua had his reward. And Scott was painting from the life when he painted both the man and the characteristic fact-crotchet, whim, hobby, call it what we please.

66

Rousseau piqued himself on the liking manifested towards him by the pigeons, and he would spend hours at a time in teaching them to trust him. A very difficult bird to tame and to teach confidence, he affirms the pigeon to be; and all the greater the kudos claimed by Jean Jacques for succeeding in inspiring his window visitors with such confidence in him that they followed him whithersoever he went, and

FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. 15

let themselves be taken whensoever he would. At last he could never make his appearance in the garden or yard but instantly two or three of them were on his shoulder or his head; and their attentions of this kind became so pressing, and ce cortège became si incommode, that he was obliged to check their familiarity. But he ever took a singular pleasure in taming animals-those in particular which are wild and timid. It seemed to him a charming thing to inspire them with a confidence which he never betrayed or abused.* His desire was to have them love him while they remained absolutely free. He carried on the like system of tactics with bees, and with like success. Mr. Froude declares "all genuine men" to be objects of special attraction to animals (as well as to children); and in his biographical sketch of Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, he recounts the " very singular instance" of the liking shown for that prelate by the big swan of Stone Manor, usually so unmanageable and savage: the bishop knew the way to his heart; fed him, and taught him to poke his head into the pockets of his frock to look for bread crumbs, which he did not fail to find there. Ever after, it is said, he seemed to know instinctively when the bishop was expected, and flew trumpeting up and down the lake, slapping the water with his wings; and on the arrival of his right reverend friend, he would strut at his side, and sometimes follow him upstairs. It was a miracle of course,† adds the biographer, to the general mind, though explicable enough to those who have observed the physical charm which men who take pains to understand animals are able to exercise over them.

Coleridge is the "noticeable man with large grey eyes," who, in the well-read description by his brother bard, would

*

Tous les animaux se défient de l'homme, et n'ont pas tort; mais sont-ils sûrs une fois qu'il ne leur veut pas nuire, leur confiance devient si grande qu'il faut être plus que barbare pour en abuser."-Rousseau : Les Confessions, livre vi.

+ Many were the miracles first and last imputed to Bishop Hugo; but he himself "thought little of miracles, turned his back on them for the most part, and discouraged them, if not as illusions, yet as matters of no consequence."-A Bishop of the 12th Century.

entice a congenial comrade to share his outdoor idlesse, the two together being as happy spirits as were ever seen : "If but a bird, to keep them company,

Or butterfly sate down, they were, I ween,

As pleased as if the same had been a maiden-queen."

Professor Lowell would have made a happy third,—even if he had quizzed them afterwards, and himself. His essay on his Garden Acquaintance told us how all the birds looked on him as if he were a mere tenant-at-will, and they were landlords. "With shame I confess it, I have been bullied even by a humming-bird." Scarce a tree of his but has had, at some time or other, a happy homestead among its boughs. "I love to bring these aborigines back to the mansuetude they showed to the early voyagers, and before (forgive the involuntary* pun) they had grown accustomed to man and knew his savage ways." Savage Landor had anything but savage ways with the creatures feræ naturæ on his estate, whether at Lanthony or at Fiesole; and proud he was to assert in octosyllabics his good fellowship with the good creatures in question, all and sundry: "Cares if I had, I turned those cares Toward my partridges and hares, At every gun and dog I heard Ill-auguring for some truant bird

Or whiskered friend of jet-tipt ear,
Until the frightened eld limpt near.

These knew me, and 'twas quite enough."

Not that he had the sympathies, and so the insight, quite exceptionally developed in his contemporary, Dr. William Elford Leach, the distinguished naturalist, who succeeded so well in evoking affectionate trust from the brute natures he studied, and who was noted for his "power to tame the most savage beast or poisonous viper, with either of which he would play with impunity."+ A recent biographer of Saint

*But was it, could it be, in the nature (and art) of it, involuntary?

We are told of its being his constant habit at one time to have with him a wolf of a very ferocious temper, but which always obeyed and followed him in his walks, and which on one occasion, while in Paris,

FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. 17

Francis of Assisi, discussing the extraordinary power over the lower animals ascribed to him in all the accounts we have of him, observed that such a gift has certainly been possessed by many who laid no claim to supernatural powers, and is asserted in our day to be hereditary in her family by a personage so little like him as the famous novelist, Georges Sand. As though it were not all myth about Kilmeny making friends and associates of the wild beasts of the hill-the wolf playing blithely around her, the lordly bison lowing and kneeling to her, the hind tripping to her over the evening dew, and the dun deer wooing her lily hand, and buzzard and corby hurrying to the tryst, and blackbird and eagle together,

"And the tod, and the lamb, and the leveret ran;

The hawk and the hern attour them hung,

And the merle and the mavis forhooyed their young;
And all in a peaceful ring were hurled :

It was like an eve in a sinless world."

That looks like Paradise regained; at least, it goes far to reproduce Milton's picture of what might be seen in Eden ere yet Paradise was lost, in his picture of the first fair couple, linked in happy nuptial league :

"About them frisking played

All beasts of the earth, since wild, and of all chase

In wood or wilderness, forest or den ;

Sporting the lion ramped, and in his paw

Dandled the kid; bears, tigers, ounces, pards,

Gambolled before them; the unwieldy elephant

To make them mirth, used all his might and wreathed
His lithe proboscis."

Fellow-creatures with, and not without fellowship with, the higher than primus inter pares, the facile princeps of them all, the first man.

remained waiting for three hours at the entrance of the Jardin des Plantes, with the fidelity of a common dog, while its master went into the grounds. Hardly the sort of loiterer which the local police would bid Circulez donc,

monseur.

C