means the occasional presence within the parish limits of either of
these anthropophagous brutes could have been established. He
brags of no fine society, but is plainly a little elated by "having
considerable acquaintance with a tame brown owl." Most of us
have known our share of owls, but few can boast of intimacy with a
feathered one. The great events of Mr. White's life, too, have that
disproportionate importance which is always humorous. To think
of his hands having actually been though worthy (as neither
Willoughby's nor Ray's were) to hold a stilted plover, the
*Charadrius himaniopus,* with no back toe, and therefore "liable,
in speculation, to perpetual vacillations"! I wonder, by the way, if
metaphysicians have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the
acquaintance in Sussex of "an old family tortoise," which had then
been domesticated for thirty years. It is clear that he fell in love
with it at first sight. We have no means of tracing the growth of his
passion; but in 1780 we find him eloping with its object in a post-
chaise. "The rattle and hurry of the journey so perfectly roused it
that, when I turned it out in a border, it walked twice down to the
bottom of my garden." It reads like a Court Journal: "Yesterday
morning H.R.H. the Princess Alice took an airing of half an hour on
the terrace of Windsor Castle." This tortoise might have been a
member of the Royal Society, if he could have condescended to so
ignoble an ambition. It had but just been discovered that a surface
inclined at a certain angle with the plane of the horizon took more
of the sun's rays. The tortoise had always known this (though he
unostentatiously made no parade of it), and used accordingly to tilt
himself up against the garden-wall in the autumn. He seems to have
been more of a philosopher than even Mr. White himself, caring for
nothing but to get under a cabbage-leaf when it rained, or the sun
was too hot, and to bury himself alive before frost,--a four-footed