If you have never seen the pigeons of the place of St. Mark at Venice, you have certainly seen the fishes of the large pond at Fontainebleau come in bands to dispute the bread thrown to them; the swans of the basins of the Tuileries swim toward the children who throw them crumbs of their cakes; the small elephants of the Garden of Plants put forth their trunks gently to seize a piece of rye bread; and more than one young girl has amused herself during the winter in spreading the crumbs from her table on her balcony, to see flocks of sparrows tumble down and help themselves at the well-set table, doing honor to the banquet, without considering in the least the pretty blonde head and the laughing mouth assisting their repast.
You see, it is always the same process. What frightens animals is noise, sudden movements, and especially bad treatment.
When man makes friends of them, it is rarely they do not respond to his advances. You know the history of Androcles and his lion, of Pellisson and his spider, and a hundred others of the same kind. I do not speak of domestic animals, the dog especially, our faithful companion. The Bible itself, the book of books, in relating the return of the young Tobias conducted by the angel to his father, has in honor of this faithful animal these charming lines: "Then the dog, who had followed them all the way, ran before them, and, like a courier who might have preceded them, he testified his joy by the wagging of his tail." The grand poet of paganism, Homer, in his turn, has described in the most touching and heartfelt verses, Ulysses, on his return to Ithaca, unknown to Penelope, Telemachus, and his retainers, but recognized by the dog, who died of joy at his feet. But passing by the dog who is our friend, savage animals show themselves no less sensible to man's goodness, and as we read the legends of monks of the Merovingian time, who lived hid in the depths of forests, it seems that virtue can give man the same empire over animals which he had in his first days of innocence. M. de Montalembert, in his Moines d'Occident, has recounted many legends of this nature. A huge boar, pursued by hunters, fled for asylum to the cell of St. Basil, which he had constructed in the thickest part of the mountain forest of Rheims. Again, St. Laumer, wandering in the forest of Perche, and chanting psalms, met a hind flying before several wolves. To him, she was the symbol and image of the Christian soul pursued by demons; he wept for pity, and cried to the wolves: "Enraged executioners, return to your dens, and leave this poor little beast; the Lord arrest this prey from your bloodthirsty mouths." The wolves stopped at his voice, and retraced their steps. "Behold," said the saint to his companion, "how the devil, of all wolves the most ferocious, seeks ever some one to strangle and devour in the church of Christ." Meanwhile the hind followed him, and he passed nearly two hours in caressing her before returning to his home.
Recitals of this nature are numerous. It was the lion of the Abbé Gérasime, whose monastery was on the borders of the Jordan, who, having loved the monk during his life, came to die on his tomb. The wolf of another solitary waited at his door for the remains of his humble repast, and never retired without licking his hand. Irish legends tell us of stags of the forests coming to present their heads to the yoke to draw the plough. Everywhere we find man's power over animals established by sanctity. "Can we be astonished," said Bède on this subject, "if he who faithfully and loyally obeys his Creator sees in his turn inferior creatures subject to his command?"
Among the legendary recitals we find none more touching than those written of St. François d'Assise, whose heart overflowed with tenderness to animals. We read in a legend that this great saint, who had a beautiful and harmonious voice, hearing one evening the song of a nightingale, was tempted to respond, so that he passed the night in chanting, alternately with the bird, the praises of God. The legend adds that François was exhausted the first, and praised the bird that had so completely vanquished him.
Who has not read in the Franciscan Poets the miracle of the saint who converted the ferocious wolf of Gubbio, and how he tamed the wild turtle-doves, a present from a pious young man, while saying to them: "O my simple and innocent doves! how will you ever be tamed? But I must save you from death, and make you nests, that you may obey the command of our Creator." And the turtle-doves, by degrees less wild, commenced to deposit their eggs, like hens, covering them before the brothers, and nourished by their hands. In conclusion, let us recall the exordium of a delightful sermon related in the Franciscan Poets, and addressed by the saint to a multitude of birds, attentive to his voice, a sermon related to Brother Jacques de Massa by Brother Massio, one of St. Francis's favorite disciples: "My birds, you are extremely obliged to God, our Creator, and always and in every place you ought to praise him, because he has given you liberty to fly everywhere, has clothed you with double and triple vestments, and has preserved your species in the ark of Noah. Besides, you neither sow nor reap, and God cares for you; gives you streams and fountains to quench your thirst, mountains and valleys for your refuge, and large trees in which to make your nests." But we have rambled from the commencement of our story. We began in the garden of the Tuileries, and end in another garden, a mystical one, where we gather flowers from St. Francis.
From Chambers's Journal
Time-Measurers.
There is, perhaps, no subject more interesting to human nature than that of time. Like eternity, it concerns us all; and, unlike it, exacts as well as demands our attention. True, as Sir Walter Scott writes, "it is but a shadowy name, a succession of breathings measured forth by night with the clank of a bell, by day with a shadow crossing along a dial stone;" but we cannot shut our eyes for very long to the fact of its passage. If in our youth we strive to kill it, so all the more in our age do we strive to lengthen its too brief hours out. Even the means by which to note its course have naturally engaged the minds of men in all ages; they have been very diverse and ingenious, and a due record of them cannot fail to contain many curious particulars. Such a work has been recently published in Mr. Wood's Curiosities of Clocks and Watches. Even the diligence of our author, however, does not seem to have discovered at what period the present method of beginning the day at midnight came into use; but it is supposed to have been an ecclesiastical invention. Among the early Romans, the day was divided into twelve hours, from sunrise to sunset, the length of which, therefore, varied with the seasons. The Egyptians, Mexicans, and Persians reckoned the day to begin from sunrise, and divided it into four intervals, determined by the rising and setting of the sun, and its two passages over the meridian. Our own uniform hours of sixty minutes each could scarcely have come into use until something like the wheel-clock was invented: the ancient sun-dial represented hours of a length varying with the seasons, and the clepsydra (or water-clock) was adjusted to furnish hours of fifty to seventy minutes each, to suit the changing lengths of day and night. Clocks, even so late as the reign of James I., were often called horologes; and, up to the fourteenth century, the word clock was applied only to the bell which rang out the hours, or certain periods determined by the sun-dial or sand-glass. To this day, the bell of Wells cathedral is still called the horologe.
The clepsydra is said to have been invented by the censor Scipio Nasica, 595 B.C. The principle of these early time-measurers was a very simple one. "In those of the common kind, the water issued drop by drop through a small hole in the vessel that contained it, and fell into a receiver, in which some light floating body marked the height of the water as it rose, and by these means the time that had elapsed. In a bas-relief of the date of the lower empire, figuring the Hippodrome in Constantinople, a clepsydra, in the shape of an oviform vase, appears. It is very simply mounted, being traversed by an axis, and turned with a crooked handle. By this contrivance, the instantaneous inversion of the vase was secured, and the contents, escaping in a certain definite time, showed the number of minutes which were taken up by each missus, or course. Vitruvius tells us of the construction of a clepsydra which, besides the hours, told the moon's age, the zodiacal sign for the month, and several other things; in fact, it was a regular astronomical clock. His details now read somewhat obscure and complicated; but the principle was that a float, as it moved upward by means of a vertical column fixed in it, drove different sets of cog-wheels, which impelled in their turn other sets, by means of which figures were made to move, obelisks to twirl round, pebbles to be discharged, trumpets to sound, and many other tricks to be put into action. The admission-pipe for the water was made either of gold or a perforated gem, in order that it might not wear away, or be liable to get foul." The floats sometimes communicated with wheels which worked hands on dials, or supported human figures which pointed with hands to certain numbers as the water rose; and in some ingenious water-clocks the fluid flowed as tears from eyes of automata; but all these clepsydrae had two great defects: the one being that the flow varied with the density of the atmosphere; the other, that the water flowed quicker at last than at first. They were, however, put to one excellent use, which has, unhappily, fallen into decay: they were set up in the law-courts to time counsel; "to prevent babbling, that such as spoke ought to be brief in their speeches." For this custom, the world was indebted to the Romans (especially Pompey), and from it Martial is supplied with a pleasant sarcasm: perceiving a dull declaimer moistening his lips with a glass of water, he suggests that it would be a relief to the audience as well as to himself if he would take his liquor from the clepsydra.