Magazine_ for 1876), and quote her summary of the Great Water-beetle's
views on life:

After living as I can, in all three--water, dry land, and air,--I
certainly prefer to be under water. Any one whose appetite is as
keen, and whose hind-legs are as powerful as mine, will understand
the delights of hunting, and being hunted, in a pond; where the
light comes down in fitful rays and reflections through the water,
and gleams among the hanging roots of the frog-bit, and the fading
leaves of the water-starwort, through the maze of which, in and
out, hither and thither, you pursue and are pursued, in cool and
skilful chase, by a mixed company of your neighbours, who dart, and
shoot, and dive, and come and go, and any one of whom, at any
moment, may either eat you or be eaten by you. And if you want
peace and quiet, where can one bury oneself so safely and
completely as in the mud? A state of existence without mud at the
bottom, must be a life without repose!

I must here venture to remark, that the chief and lasting value of
whatever both my sister and my mother wrote about animals, or any
other objects in Nature, lies in the fact that they invariably took
the utmost pains to verify whatever statements they made relating to
those objects. Spiritual Laws can only be drawn from the Natural World
when they are based on Truth.

Julie spared no trouble in trying to ascertain whether Hedgehogs _do_
or do not eat pheasants' eggs; she consulted _The Field_, and books on
sport, and her sporting friends, and when she found it was a disputed
point, she determined to give the Hedgepig the benefit of the doubt.
Then the taste for valerian, and the fox's method of capture, were