the eyes of subscribers to the gardens, but it had not been creditable to the Corporation. True elegance, it appears, which can only come from true breeding, had been wanting. These ducks were "a mongrel lot," and though they might be pretty to look at and entertaining to feed, that was not what the Corporation cared about. What the Corporation did care about, presumably, was to read in the local papers, or be told by their friends that now, at last, there were some ducks on the Cheltenham lakes a little better than the "mongrel lot" one had so long been accustomed to see there, more worthy of themselves, more worthy of the town they represented, and so forth. So the poor "mongrel lot," the delight of all the children, and of many a grown-up person to boot—Charles the Second was grown up, and a clever man too—were done away with, and a few pairs of select, blue-blooded strangers (more soothing to gentle bourgeois feelings) were introduced in their place. The children who came to feed them said, "Where are the others? Where are all the rest gone to? There's no fun in feeding three or four." Nor is there, in comparison with feeding a hundred, as one grown-up person at least can testify. As additions, these new arrivals would have been welcome enough, and being of distinct species they would not, probably, have entered into mésalliances with the others, to make a correct Corporation blush. Why could they not have stayed? But this, I suppose, was the way of it. Here were pleasure gardens for which the public
