cat, given him on account of his gravity, morality, and uprightness.
We never familiarly call him John). I petted Calvin. I lavished
upon him an enthusiastic fondness. I told him that he had no fault;
that the one action that I had called a vice was an heroic exhibition
of regard for my interests. I bade him go and do likewise
continually. I now saw how much better instinct is than mere
unguided reason. Calvin knew. If he had put his opinion into
English (instead of his native catalogue), it would have been: "You
need not teach your grandmother to suck eggs." It was only the round
of Nature. The worms eat a noxious something in the ground. The
birds eat the worms. Calvin eats the birds. We eat--no, we do not
eat Calvin. There the chain stops. When you ascend the scale of
being, and come to an animal that is, like ourselves, inedible, you
have arrived at a result where you can rest. Let us respect the cat.
He completes an edible chain.

I have little heart to discuss methods of raising peas. It occurs to
me that I can have an iron peabush, a sort of trellis, through which
I could discharge electricity at frequent intervals, and electrify
the birds to death when they alight: for they stand upon my beautiful
brush in order to pick out the peas. An apparatus of this kind, with
an operator, would cost, however, about as much as the peas. A
neighbor suggests that I might put up a scarecrow near the vines,
which would keep the birds away. I am doubtful about it: the birds
are too much accustomed to seeing a person in poor clothes in the
garden to care much for that. Another neighbor suggests that the
birds do not open the pods; that a sort of blast, apt to come after
rain, splits the pods, and the birds then eat the peas. It may be
so. There seems to be complete unity of action between the blast and
the birds. But, good neighbors, kind friends, I desire that you will