Our Winged House-Fellows by Grant Allen — Read

WE have been sitting this afternoon in the Big Drawing-room, enjoying the view from its extensive windows. It is a spacious apartment for so small a house-about three acres large, with windows that open all round over miles of moorland. The carpet has a groundwork of fallen pine-needles and green grass and bracken, irregularly threaded with a tiny pattern of brocaded flowers-yellow tormentil, white bedstraw, golden stonecrop, red sheep-sorrel; while by way of roof the room is covered by a fretted ceiling of interlacing fir-branches, through which one can catch at frequent intervals deep glimpses of a high and bright blue dome that overarches with its vast curve the entire Big Drawing-room. No finer throne-hall has any earthly king; it is quite good enough for ourselves and our visitors.

But as we leaned back in our easy-chairs-spring seats of brake, backed with a bole of red pine-bark-we gazed upward overhead through the gaps in the boughs, and saw our winged house-fellows, the black-and-white martins, sweeping round in long curves after flies in the sunshine. It was immensely picturesque for the martins and ourselves; how the flies regard the question I forbear to inquire at the present juncture. We had lamb chops for lunch; let him that is without sin amongst us-for example, the editor of the _Vegetarian Times_-cast the first stone at the house-martins. For myself, I am too conscious of carnivorous and other sinful tastes to cast stones at anybody. We are all human, say I, or at any rate vertebrate; let us agree to take things with vertebrate toleration.