discipline to poor Mrs. Callender, who considered, and not perhaps without reason, that her providing was much too good for a dog. The ducks and turkeys, too, would come boldly round the doorstep to eat from his hand; and as for the little fan-tails in the garden, it was really pretty to see them with the old doctor. They would come flickering and flirting about his great white head without the smallest fear, and settle on his knee or his finger; cocking their little heads questioningly on one side, and looking up at him out of their bright black eyes with the most knowing expression. When autumn came, they fairly took up their quarters for a time in the old kitchen, creating with their mid-air antics a perfect whirlpool of movement within its quiet atmosphere, breaking the solemn silence with brisk monosyllables of bird chat, and making no scruple whatever, if they wanted a perch, of alighting upon the very most portentous of all the brown leather tomes.
“The lesser brethren,” the old man used to call them; and when Mrs. Callender once, humouring him as she would have done a child, asked him what they talked so much to him about, “Oh, we share a secret,” he answered, with a smile and laying a mysterious finger to his lip. “Consciousness, men call it, but they know only one word of it. Perhaps the little birds know another.” And good Mrs. Callender went sadly away, feeling that Roger was quite right—the poor old dear was getting very childish.
As regards his daily life, it was his custom to rise late, and of a bright morning to sit with a closed book on his knee—either out on the clean,
