mouse-trap; and the fond stranger finds himself at once precluded from retreat; as far as ever from his friend, and plate, and glass; and pent between an iron floor and an iron ceiling, so near to each other that it is much if he can hold his head up between them, till the traitorous fowler comes to remove him from the trap to the dark dungeon, not a decoy-cage, scarcely loftier, and not so large as the vile trap itself!

Thus, then, was I circumstanced;-not, as I had yet to thank my stars, not the decoyer, but the decoyed;-for, however hapless, I had yet one happiness, and it was no small one, that I was guiltless, innocent; the injured only, not the injurer! But thus, then, was I circumstanced. There was no decoybird underneath. The proper cage was empty of a tenant, though furnished with a dinner; and it was I that filled the trap, with its foul door closed down, as impermeable to feathered visitor, as the closed hatches of a ship to water in a gale! But my cries ascended through the bars; they reached the thickets and the gardens; and hence, though the secluded Robins that sat in them might have seemed few or none to any searcher but the sorrowful, I had soon about me one, two, or three; and, soonest of the three, my mother! The pitying strangers, like my mother herself, did all they could to help me; but what was it they could do? I did not seem to be in want of food (nor did my stomach, as the reader knows, want it any more than it could have it), or they would have brought it to me in their endearing bills! I could not fly away with them; that they saw, and mourned over me therefor! It was not through a broken wing, or through a wound, or through weakness; or they would have joined their strength to carry me! But

I was a sufferer through unnatural means, and such as they had no art to overcome! They could give me, then, but their condolences, and those were not withheld; but (condolences bestowed, and sympathy expressed, and kindly hopes imparted, and second visits promised) the pitying strangers, one by one, fled, and left me; not indeed alone, but to the sole solace of my mother!

She, poor bird, after trying, like the rest, to set me free, found nothing within her power, but to share, as far as wires allowed, my prison and detention; and these she seemed resolved to share with perseverance. Upon a neighbouring spray, she, from her own coming, to that of Mr. Gubbins, sat, like the sister of Moses, or like the mother of the five kings whom Joshua hung upon five trees; she, an anxious or a weeping watcher, sat, and returned and returned my sighs, till the sounding path, and shaken branches, announced a human footstep. At that moment, it is true, she vanished to the next tree; for what remained, even to her, at this new shock, amidst all her timidity and helplessness? She, small guardian, had no power, like eagle, or like pelican, or even like dove or hen against a hawk, to make battle for her young one! She was a reed in the blast, and must bend! The way of the weak (and by turns we all are weak) is to shrink before the weapon, and to escape only as they fly, or as they are spared. Mr. Gubbins came, and still my mother watched; he carried me toward the house, and my mother hid herself in the thicket; she took with her grief and fear, and found nothing to help her, except hope!

CHAP. VII.

The heart is hard in nature, and unfit
For human fellowship, as being void
Of sympathy, and therefore dead alike
To love and friendship both; that is not pleased
With sight of animals enjoying life,

Nor feels their happiness augment its own!

COWPER.

MR. GUBBINS, so long as the success of his experiment was uncertain, had been very careful to conceal from his wife and daughter; from his neighbours (with the exception of his necessary confidence in Farmer Mowbray, and in his confederate, Cobbler Dykes); from the boys in his school-room, and even from Sukey in the kitchen, the gentle pranks which he was playing with my poor self! But, now that every thing had gone to his wish, and all (as I rejoiced most sincerely to hear him say) was over, except the single remaining act of setting me at liberty; now, he was too happy in the reward of his labours; too proud of the issue to which he had brought them; and too bold in the consciousness that he could justify his proceedings, not to spring with the glee and lightness of a child of five years old, bearing me conspicuous in his hand, from the trap to the little shed under which all the females were at the moment busy in making elder-berry wine!

Quick, however, as were all his motions, and ready as he felt his tongue to give an account, to the utmost advantage, 'of all his motives, and even performances; swifter still were the acts and words of reproof which

he instantaneously drew down upon himself, in the unhesitating anticipation that he had certainly done me wrong. It is beautiful to observe among mankind, those wayward creatures who need so many governors and monitors to keep them in any thing like a course of justice, especially toward their inferiors (Robin-red-breasts and others); it is beautiful to observe among mankind, the operation of that instinct which they possess, to denounce, with the rapidity of heaven's own lightning, and with the loudness of heaven's own thunder, whatever they see, or think that they see, amiss, in the conduct of their fellows; so, that every man, to every man, is a judge and an executioner, and an echo of the rules and sentences of universal order! True it is that this instinct, like other instincts, often operates blindly; whence it happens that very innocent actions, and very innocent persons, fall daily under its scourge, through the mistakes of these same judges and executioners, who, with whatever honesty, yet often with rashness, and oftener still with ignorance, imagine both of them to be guilty. But, instead of staying to explain how this admirable and amiable human instinct is sometimes made a means of evil, while it is more generally a means of good, I shall only give the example, as afforded in my particular case; where Mr. Gubbins, for the time, was doomed to meet all that visitation of reproof, not from his wife only, but from his daughter, and from his serving-maid, of which he had lived in terror from the first moment that he even thought of intermeddling with me; which was the genuine outcry of offended nature, bursting from the members of his household; and of which his dread before it came, and his passing consternation when it arrived,

shows how happily dependent are all these giants upon the good opinion of their fellow-giants; and how this instinct of theirs serves to punish crimes when committed, and to prevent more than it is ever called upon to punish! No sooner had Mr. Gubbins, in showing my little head from the hollow between his bended thumb and his fore-finger, unguardedly let it be known that he had caught me in a trap, and had set a trap to catch me; than, one after another, or all at the same time, these were the exclamations which his pained and terrified ears were made to receive into their cells:

"Oh, Ephraim Gubbins," cried his wife, "how could you!"

"Oh, father," cried Mary Gubbins, "how could you!"

"Oh, master," cried Sukey, the serving-maid, "how could you!"

And much had Mr. Gubbins to exert himself, with all his eloquence and his explanations, before he was able to pacify, even in some small degree, the heaving bosoms, either of his wife, his daughter, or his servingmaid, as to the hard case in which he had involved poor little Robin-red-breast! Said I not that this beautiful human instinct is the voice of nature itself, the guide of the human race, and the protector of the feeble and the innocent? Alas! how could that extraordinary species, so strong and so self-willed, contrive to live for themselves, or to be bearable to others, without its aid? What is it that they would not do, if, besides other fears, they feared not the reproof of others, nor valued their good opinion?

It was now that Mr. Gubbins explained, in words that it consoled and delighted me to hear, and that