"But I think she's perfectly charming," said Mrs. Brindlock.
"Pho, Aunt Mabel! I could name ten girls as pretty."
And he could. But this did not forbid his accepting his Aunt Mabel's invitation for the next day's shopping.
He is not altogether the same lad we saw upon the deck of the Princess, under Captain Saul. He would hardly sail for China now in a tasselled cap. He never will,—this much we can say, at least, without anticipating the burden of our story.
NATURAL HISTORY OF THE PEACOCK.
The peacock sits perched on the roof all night,
And wakes up the farm-house before 't is light;
But his matins they suit not the delicate ear
Of the drowsy damsels that half in fear
And half in disgust his discord hear.
If the soul's migration from frame to frame
Be truth, tell me now whence the peacock's came?
Say if it had birth at the musical close
Of a dying hyena,—or if it arose
From a Puritan scold that sang psalms through her nose?
Well: a jackass there was—but you need not look
For this fable of mine in old Æsop's book—
That one complaint all his life had whined,
How Nature had been either blind or unkind
To give him an aspect so unrefined.
"'T is cruel," he groaned, "that I cannot escape
From the vile prison-house of this horrible shape:
So gentle a temper as mine to shut in
This figure uncouth and so shaggy a skin,
And then these long ears!—it's a shame and a sin."