The keeper took to his heels, told the doleful story to his master, who had not made up his mind how to act ere he received a challenge from the General for insulting him by ordering his servant to shoot his setter. Seeing the sort of customer he had to deal with, the nobleman thought it best to come to an amicable arrangement and accept the defeat.
The editor of the Terre Haute Journal had the impudence to write: 'The reason why Lafayette doesn't build a rink is this. The ladies of that city have such big feet that no more than four or five could skate in a rink at one time; therefore the concern wouldn't pay.' Whereupon the Lafayette Journal retorted: 'It is a number eleven lie. The Lafayette ladies are celebrated for their pretty feet. All's well, you know, that ends well, and the Terre Haute editor, afflicted with the daily exhibition of agricultural hoofs, is dying of envy. Goodwin of our city once made a pair of twenty-eights for a Terre Haute belle. He built them in the back-yard on a sort of marine railway, and launched them. If ever an old woman lived in a shoe, it was down at Terre Haute.'
Ladies know how to give tit for tat, as a politician learned when, piqued by a fair listener noticing a pet dog while he was holding forth to her on the Eastern Question, he asked how a woman of her intelligence could be so fond of a dog. 'Because he never talks politics,' was the significant reply.
An Englishman attached to the Washington Commission incautiously remarked to his pretty American partner at a ball, that although he had seen many beautiful women, he had not come across a handsome man in the States. 'I suppose there are plenty of handsome men in England?' she observed. 'O yes, lots,' said he; provoking the poser: 'Then why didn't Queen Victoria send some over here?'
[STORY OF A PARTRIDGE AND HER CHICKS.]
One morning in the beginning of July an agricultural labourer, in the employment of an East Lothian farmer, was driving a reaping-machine in a field of long grass preparatory to haymaking. In a part of the field that the machine had not yet shorn, a hen partridge was sitting on a number of eggs which were within a few short hours of being hatched. It may naturally be conceived that the bird would hear with no little concern the sharp clipping noise made by the machine as, in its progress up and down the ridges, it approached nearer and nearer to the nest; but like a true mother, she would rather die than leave her nearly hatched young. As the knife of the machine, in quick shuttle-like motion, laid swath after swath of goodly rye-grass level with the ground, the iron fingers of the cutter struck the bird, killed her, and drove her some distance from the nest. To the moment of her death she kept the eggs warm; and the young life within them that she had cherished soon afterwards found protection.
The driver of the machine, who was a kind-hearted man, stopped his horses and gazed compassionately on the poor bird. Soon, however, his attention was withdrawn from the dead bird by hearing numerous minute, plaintive, peeping sounds—as if made by very tiny, fine-throated, tender chicks. Hastily concluding that a brood of young partridges lay buried and struggling for life in the nearest swath of grass, he turned it carefully over and over, in expectation of seeing a number of chicks; but after a diligent search, he could not discover any birds whatever. Still the peeping noises continued. The workman stood silent and listened attentively, in order that his ear might catch the true direction of the sounds. By the unceasing 'Peep, peep, peep,' he was attracted to a little hollow in the ground. There, almost hid from observation, lay sixteen sounding eggs, for it was from the eggs that the peeping chorus proceeded! The farmer, who was in the field, came to the spot where the driver was standing; and he being also of a humane disposition, placed the eggs carefully in his handkerchief, and carried them home to the farmstead, where they were soon placed under a common sitting hen. In a few hours afterwards the partridge chicks had broken open their shells, and were running about their foster-mother crying 'Peep, peep, peep.'
The writer may be permitted to add, that when partridge chicks are hatched by a common hen, they should be intrusted to a gamekeeper or other person who understands the kind of food the birds need, otherwise it will be almost impossible to rear them.