Now It Is Curious That The Sparrows And Blackbirds, Yellowhammers And Greenfinches, That Roost In The Bushes, Fly Into The Net And Are Easily Captured, But The Starlings - Thanks To Their Different Ways In Daylight - Always Fly Out At The Top Of The Bush, And So Escape.

II. A black cannon ball lies in a garden, an ornament like a shell or a fossil, among blue lobelia and green ferns.

It is about as big as a cricket ball - a mere trifle to look at. What a contrast with the immense projectiles thrown by modern guns! Yet it is very heavy - quite out of proportion to its size. Imagine iron cricket balls bounding along the grass and glancing at unexpected angles, smashing human beings instead of wickets. This cannon ball is not a memorial of the Civil War. It was shot at a carter with his waggon. Our grandfathers had no idea of taking care of other people's lives. Every man had to look out for himself; if you got in the way, that was your fault. A battery was practising, and they did not trouble themselves about the highway road which skirted the range; and as the carter was coming home with his waggon one of the balls ricocheted and rolled along in front of his horses. He picked it up and brought it home, and there it has lain many a long year, a silent witness, like the bricks Jack Cade put in the chimney, to the extraordinary change of ideas which has taken place. We are all expected nowadays to think not only of ourselves but of others, and if a man fires a gun without due precautions, and injures or even might have injured another, he is liable. All our legislation and all the drift of public opinion goes in this direction. Men were the same then as now; the change in this respect shows the immense value of ideas. They were then quite strangers to the very idea of taking any thought for those who might chance to be in the way. That has been inculcated of recent years. Those were the days when there was an irresponsible tyrant in every village, who could not indeed hang men at his castle gate by feudal right of gallows, but who could as effectually silence them by setting in motion laws made by the rich for the rich. It is on record how a poor carrier, whose only fortune was a decrepit horse, dared presumptuously, against the will of the lord of the manor, to water his horse at a roadside pond. For this offence he was taken before the justices and fined, his goods seized, -

And the knackers had his silly old horse, And so John Harris was bowled out!

Then there was a still more terrible offence - a hungry man picked up a rabbit. 'How dared John Bartlett for to venture for to go for to grab it?' But they put him in gaol and cured him of 'that there villanous habit,' which rhymes, and the tale thereof may be found by the student of old times in the 'Punch' of the day - a good true honest manly Punch, who brought his staff down heavily on the head of abuses and injustice.

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