We have gone through the permission to learn the three R's up to their becoming a necessity, and that greatest R of all-Religion-for the sake of which alone we taught in old times, has a hard matter to hold its

own.

MAY

NEVER did Wordsworth sing a truer or a sweeter note than in his address to May. True, she often sets in, as people say, with 'her accustomed severity,' and cold rain is falling, or east wind is blowing, and blighting frost has turned brown the green shoots of potatoes and pease, and made limp rags of the first premature endeavours of the oaks. Yet still there always are some perfect days of the poets.

And what if thou, sweet May, hast known
Mishap by worm and blight,

If expectations newly blown.

Have perished in thy sight;

If loves and joys, while up they sprung,

Were caught as in a snare:

Such is the lot of all the young,

However bright and fair.

Of all others, be the weather what it will, May is the month of singing of birds. The larks are quivering and shouting high up in the sky long before sunrise, the thrushes and blackbirds take up the strain, and though the nightingale ceases for an hour or two, and only resumes after his breakfast, the whole air is full of twitterings, chirpings, and songs. The turtle-dove groans, the wood-pigeon. invites Taffy, Take two cows, Taffy! Taffy, take two!' the tame pigeon mourns complacently on our roofs, and the African dove coo-roos, bows, and laughs in our cages.

Each has its own voice. The turtle is a small creature, keeping in pairs, not flocks, and with the ring round the neck speckled with darkest green and white, so as to give a chess-board effect. It builds in low bushes, the proverbial untidy nest of the dove kind,

and is much less common than that handsome and devouring creature, the cushat or wood-pigeon, the ring-dove proper, so called on account of the white collar very conspicuous on its gray throat, as it flies out with a great rush.

Shenstone wrote

I have found out a gift for my fair,

I have found where the wood-pigeons breed;
But let me the plunder forbear,

She will say 'twas a barbarous deed.

And it would have been an unsatisfactory one likewise, unless his fair' had uncommon powers, for the wood-pigeon is an untamable creature. I have known one rescued, with an injured wing, almost in its infancy, bred up in the same cage with a number of doves, yet never ceasing to be terrified at human approach, and tumbling about in a one-sided way, quite distressing to behold.

Wood-pigeons are not plentiful enough here to be very mischievous, though there are enough of them for them to be considered as enemies by the farmer; but their residence in the ivy, their voices, the best of those of all our English pigeons, their beautiful forms, and delicate subdued colouring, make them great favourites with the no-farmer.

As to the mourning of a dove, that proverb is only due to its murmuring voice; and the constancy of the widowed dove is equally a poetical fiction. The African dove does not mourn at all, but bows and goes 'majoring' about to very lively tunes of its own, and, moreover, indulges in peals of laughter, whence its specific name of Risoria, the laughing dove. It is very hardy, and, when there is sufficient range apart from villages, will fly about and nest in the trees, though too often molested by hawks.

The yaffil laughed loud.