make matting; but you no longer find gray amber, or black tin, or that

triple species of slate--one sort green, one blue, and the third the

colour of sage-leaves. The foxes, the badgers, the otters, and the

martens have taken themselves off; on the cliffs of Portland, as well as

at the extremity of Cornwall, where there were at one time chamois, none

remain. They still fish in some inlets for plaice and pilchards; but the

scared salmon no longer ascend the Wey, between Michaelmas and

Christmas, to spawn. No more are seen there, as during the reign of

Elizabeth, those old unknown birds as large as hawks, who could cut an

apple in two, but ate only the pips. You never meet those crows with

yellow beaks, called Cornish choughs in English, pyrrocorax in Latin,

who, in their mischief, would drop burning twigs on thatched roofs. Nor

that magic bird, the fulmar, a wanderer from the Scottish archipelago,

dropping from his bill an oil which the islanders used to burn in their

lamps. Nor do you ever find in the evening, in the plash of the ebbing

tide, that ancient, legendary neitse, with the feet of a hog and the

bleat of a calf. The tide no longer throws up the whiskered seal, with

its curled ears and sharp jaws, dragging itself along on its nailless

paws. On that Portland--nowadays so changed as scarcely to be

recognized--the absence of forests precluded nightingales; but now the

falcon, the swan, and the wild goose have fled. The sheep of Portland,

nowadays, are fat and have fine wool; the few scattered ewes, which

nibbled the salt grass there two centuries ago, were small and tough and

coarse in the fleece, as became Celtic flocks brought there by

garlic-eating shepherds, who lived to a hundred, and who, at the

distance of half a mile, could pierce a cuirass with their yard-long

arrows. Uncultivated land makes coarse wool. The Chesil of to-day

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The Man Who Laughs