meant to pick up any dinner-then, when the birds had been cleaned and tended, and the cotton-wool bed of the white mice renewed, and a few finishing touches put to the stuffed birds which were stiffening, with some supports, upon their twigs, then what had the day to offer? One could sit a whole half-hour or more over Wood's "Natural History or "The Dog Crusoe," but even at the end of that great lapse of time there remained enormously long hours unconsumed. We would watch the cows munching steadily with heads turned away from the rain, confirming the presage of the

We had great ambitions, which we never arrived at gratifying, to have the nests of some of these social insects (we did not much care which) under glass, so that we might make a study of their habits. Once we did go the length of digging up a bumble bees' nest, enclosing the whole mass of moss and comb and hotly buzzing chestnutcolored insects in a muslin bag, and transferring it to a box which had been fitted with a glass back. We placed the box on the window-sill of the room in which were our birds, our white mice, skins, caterpillars, and all the other captives of our bows and spears. Then we withdrew the rooks. Had it been going to clear they cork wherewith we had closed the entrance-hole, which we had intended to be the door of the hive. The bees so far availed themselves of it as to find their way out by this hole, but did not fulfil the second part of our intention, which was that they should return again by the same convenient passage. The faithless insects abandoned their home and their honeycomb, and we never set eyes on them again.

It was a sad disappointment. We had indulged in pleasant visions of beguiling the interminable hours of the hopelessly wet days, which were not uncommon in our western county, by watching the curious doings of the bees, and even had visions of their making for us vast stores of honey. In point of fact, the humble bee (which is a more correct name for it than the homely "bumble ") makes very little honey, sufficient only for the few individuals of which its societies are composed, and that little of a poor, earthy flavor.

We have often speculated how long, by the adult measurement of time, a wet day is to boyhood. Even a fine day was of measureless length, and the six weeks' summer holidays a virtual eternity, for their end was quite beyond the horizon of our mental view. But on the wet days, the really hopeless ones on which the rooks knew that it was no good waiting for better times, and that they must just come out and chance colds and rheumatism if they

would have clustered beneath the trees awaiting the fine weather; but they, like the rooks, knew that it was hopeless. Flattening our noses on the panes and watching the ceaseless drip was an entertainment which palled after five minutes. It was too wet even to go in search of food for the innumerable caterpillars which we kept in boxes fronted with perforated zinc. The hours were very blank.

Happily there always remained the stable-loft. We mounted to it by a fixed ladder leading up to a little door through which a boy could pass almost without stooping. Inside it was dark and musty. The only light came through a little slit in the far wall, opposite which stood the chaff-cutting machine with the shoot down which the chaff slid into the harness-room. The bulk of the long, low room was filled with bundles of hay, lying ready for the cutting. Around and behind these bundles were the most wondrous hiding-places, where an hour or two of a wet day might pass without dragging. For the secrecy appealed to our boyish reserve, and the darkness favored visions of the imagination, while underneath we could hear the horses stamping and champing, the pigeons murmuring to each other in their cote on the back wall of the stables, and the pigs grunting and squealing in their own place. Unless chaff-cutting was going on, no one shared this dark, musty solitude with us, except the

place on which we had hung the rag soaked in the sugared beer- and then turn on the lantern! The tipsy moths, hurriedly rushing from their feast of alcoholic sweets, went reeling down into the receptive net. A few escaped,

lighted lantern without recalling that odor of the sugared beer which was so often associated with it, and fancying ourselves creeping, like Guy Fawkes, down the byways of the orchard, with the warm night airs playing upon us, and seeming to brush us with the invisible wings of ghostly moths.

stable cats. Doubtless they caught | creep along, in stealth and darkness, abundance of mice in the loft, but our until we had arrived at the very tree, eyes, though they were sharp enough, then to fix the net below the familiar could not see mice in that twilight; and though spiders, earwigs, beetles, and many queer insects must have been constantly about us, we were aware of nothing but an occasional "yellow underwing," who would rush with hurried flight from the place of conceal-like ghosts, over its edges, and, vanishment from which we had ousted him, ing, left us with the impression that immediately to disappear from our fishes leave with us when they break sight so soon as ever he settled again away, that they were rarer, choicer, and closed the sober, brown over-wings larger, than any which had come into on the bright yellow of the nether. the net. And then began the hard and The yellow underwing was always an delicate work of transferring the moths object of eager pursuit, though I had into the somniferous fumes of the chloseveral of his kind in my collection of roform bottle, a task which was rarely moths. We set a value on moths in effected without some harm to the delisome proportion to their size, and com- cate downy wings. It is through the mon though he was, we found few sense of smell that old memories are bigger than the yellow underwing. most readily revived, and we cannot Once we had caught two privet hawk-now smell the peculiar, hot flavor of a moths on the privet hedge around the elm-tree on which we put out our young jackdaws; but these were the only specimens of the hawk-moths which we ever found. Of course I except the humming-bird hawk-moth, which is a day-flier, and which we constantly caught as he poised, with wings moving at invisible speed, to suck the honey from the heliotropes. We scarcely accounted him a real moth, any more than we did the gamma or the six-spot burnet, or any other of the daylight-loving moths. But there was a charm, a mystery, and a fascination about going out into the dark, warm summer night with a bull's-eye lantern and hawking with a butterfly net, whether around the ivy blossom in the right season or trees whose stems we had previously anointed with a rich decoction of beer and sugar. In these latter visits there was a peculiar charm, and all the special excitement of the "stalk." For of course it would not do to go along with the eye of the lantern naked, as did Mr. Pickwick on a memorable occasion. The light would have alarmed the feasting moths at once, and we should not have found one waiting for us when we came to the anointed tree. The plan was to

It is a charming memory. There is in it an element of such sustained and progressive excitement, beginning with the delightful uncertainty whether there would be a moth at all about the rag; then, this uncertainty solved and satisfied, there remained yet to be seen their numbers and their kind; and this latter question could not be determined with any nicety out of doors by the lantern's shifty light, but must be the subject of further search in the pages of Morris's "British Moths." And so, when all the trees had been visited, we would go happily to bed and dream magnificent and magnifying dreams of the creatures who had gleamed down into the net when the lantern's light struck them off the trees, and were now sleeping a last sleep in the big-necked, chloroformbefumed bottles. We believe there would be the same delight in it even now, could we go back to it. It would

at least be better than too much port | It is true we would urge Viper on to wine and tobacco.

sofa would buy, say, four hundred | vain, disgusting earth and moss. Then grown rabbits, and goodness knows there is nothing for it but to shake the how many of the size that Viper had earth out of one's mouth, to claw away slain, then we should at once have en- with one's paw the grass, to spit out tered into the matter from the stand-the moss, and to go away with head point of Authority, for the financial and tail depressed, hoping for better argument appeals very strongly to a luck next time. It is no good going on boy. Problems of finance afflict him digging and scratching; the mole is more pressingly, as a rule, than any much quicker at that game; and the others, and he can grasp questions into vain digging and scratching is the which sixpences and shillings enter method of the other nine hundred and with a surprising avidity. It is not ninety-nine dogs out of a thousand who much use to talk to him in terms of have not been given the excellent facsovereigns, for the sum is too big to be ulty of putting themselves in the mole's familiar, and only dazzles the brain by place. For without that indispensable its magnitude. After all, the whole gift, how was one to know that the problem of education resolves itself mole would take fright and retreat at into a question of the faculty to "put once into underground fortresses? yourself in his place." Unfortunately it is a faculty given to very, very few. Viper had it. We cannot conceive how, otherwise, he could have been so successful as he was in catching moles. Very few dogs have the knack. In all our life we have known but four that were any good at it, and their methods were always the same. Very stealthily would they approach, attracted by the view of the dark line of molehills, or by the scent of the underground

How was one to know indeed that a little heaving of the earth, like an earthquake in miniature, meant a mole at all, unless one had thought out the manner in which the black villain, sedulously digging, was likely to make his way beneath the soil?

From The Fortnightly Review.

NORWAY.

worker. Very slowly lifting each foot THE POLITICAL CRISIS IN SWEDEN AND with separate thought and care, with many silent pauses in statuesque attitudes, they draw up to the little mounds. Once among them the progress must be yet more studied and careful, the statuesque moments of longer duration. Gradually the attitude of stealthy advance is changed for the collected crouching preparatory to a spring. Suddenly the dog leaps into the air like a salmon jumping from a pool. Like a salmon, too, the dog comes down again with a headlong dive. With wide-open jaws and paws together he lands, burying his muzzle in the ground where it heaved above the tunnelling mole, tearing away from the ground a great mouthful of moss and grass, and earth, and amongst it all the little warm black body out of which he is shaking the life.

Or it may be that the little warm black body has altogether escaped him, so that his mouthful is nothing but

So much has been said and written during the course of the last few years with regard to the unsatisfactory relations existing between Sweden and Norway that many people must doubtless have lost interest in the matter, and begun to suspect that a crisis extending already over so many years of the past, may be almost indefinitely prolonged into the future. Nevertheless the idea would not be a correct one, for the standing quarrel between the two countries has recently assumed such proportions, and tended towards such definite issues, that no one whose attention has been specially directed to the history of the controversy can doubt that a final settlement of some kind or another is at hand.

It is, moreover, too often forgotten that the Scandinavian question has an international bearing of great interest and importance. Ever since the re

arrangement of the map of Europe | the integrity of Norway. Thus, as after the Napoleonic wars the boundary things are now situated, any act of between Russia and Norway has re- aggression on the part of Russia against mained fixed and stationary. If an Norrland might, and probably would, atlas be consulted, it will be noticed be treated by the guaranteeing powers that in one district, in the extreme as a casus belli. But, in the event of north of Norrland, Russian territory the Union being repealed, this treaty reaches to within a few miles of the guarantee would no longer hold good, Varanger Fjord, a narrow strip only of and thus another obstacle in the way of Norwegian territory intervening be- Russia would be removed. tween it and the coast. This fjord contains many fine harbors, which are free from ice all the year round; just such harbors as Russia has always coveted. Under present conditions, Russia's navy in time of war would have to base its operations from three inland seas, two of which are rendered unnavigable by ice during the winter months. It will be easy to realize what an accession to Russia's naval strength the acquisition of such an open port on the North Sea would be.

Before entering into the merits of the dispute it will be as well to make clear what is the exact nature of the union between Sweden and Norway, for it is probably without a parallel in history, and is certainly not, as a rule, very clearly apprehended outside the limits of the countries themselves.

By the terms of the Treaty of Kiel (January, 1814) Denmark ceded Norway, which until that time had been under her rule and subject to the same laws and constitution with herself, to Although Russia during a period of Sweden, the intention being that Noreighty years has made no openly ag- way should become incorporated with gressive movement against Norway, Sweden, and the two countries should she has nevertheless pursued her well- form one kingdom ruled over by one known methods of preparing a way king. Against this arrangement the beforehand. She has done all within Norwegians rebelled. They chose a her power to encourage her subjects Danish prince as their king, and drew to emigrate into Norrland and settle up a Constitution for themselves. This there, with the result that there are at Constitution was founded on the the present date considerable numbers French Republican model of 1791, and of Russian Finns inhabiting the neigh-gave as little power to their self-elected borhood of the Varanger. She has king as could well be contrived. also, with the permission of Norway Naturally, this plan neither suited bien entendu, constructed a railway the views of Sweden nor the great which connects Russia with the east-powers. Karl Johan repaired to Norern margin of the Fjord.

Should the Norwegian separatists get their way, a step, and a very important one, would be gained by Russia. Members of the party have before now openly advocated the surrender of the Varanger Fjord to Russia. It has even been suspected that they may have entered into negotiations, with a view to ascertaining if Russia would be willing to lend them her support in their efforts to obtain a separation, and offering the Fjord as the price to be paid for it. But this is not all. At the time of the formation of the Union between Sweden and Norway, England, Prussia, and Austria guaranteed

way to support his claims. The short war of 1814 followed, and Norway was compelled to lay down her arms and withdraw all opposition to the Union. Karl Johan could then have dictated what terms he chose-could, for instance, have insisted that Norway should have been incorporated with Sweden, as she had previously been incorporated with Denmark. But, with a moderation which, considering the time at which it was exercised, must be looked upon as remarkable, he allowed Norway to retain the Constitution she had chosen for herself, subject to the condition that he should be chief of the State, and that, so far as foreign rela