Under the Sun. Philip Stewart Robinson
come in to clean his cage, and not to be eaten. The excitement outside was owing to the lion’s own inconsiderate and greedy conduct. But if they did not want him to eat the keeper, why did they put him into the cage?
In my Indian Garden
PART I.
INDIAN SKETCHES.
I.
IN MY INDIAN GARDEN.
A GARDEN everywhere is to the natural world beyond its walls very much what a good Review number is to the rest of literature. Shrubs and flowers, indigenous or of distant derivation, jumbled together, attract an equally miscellaneous congregation of birds and insects, and by their fresher leaves, brighter blossoms, or juicier fruit, detain for a time the capricious and fastidious visitors. An Indian Garden is par excellence Nature’s museum—a gallery of curiosities for the indifferent to admire, the interested to study. It is a Travellers’ Club, an Œcumenical Council, a Parliament of buzzing, humming, chirping, and chattering things.
The great unclouded sky is terraced out by flights of birds. Here, in the region of trees, church-spires, and house-tops, flutter and have their being the myriad tribes who plunder while they share the abodes of men; the diverse crew who jostle on the earth, the lowest level of creation, with mammals, and walk upon its surface plantigrade; the small birds whose names children learn, whom schoolboy’s snare, and who fill the shelves of museums as the Insessores, or birds that perch. They are the commonalty of birddom, who furnish forth the mobs which bewilder the drunken-flighted jay when he jerks, shrieking, in a series of blue hyphen-flashes through the air—or which, when some owlet, as unfortunate as foolish, has let itself be jostled from its cost hole beneath the thatch out into the glare of daylight—crowd round the blinking stranger and unkindly jeer it from amongst them. These are the ground-floor tenants, our every-day walk acquaintances, who look up to crows as to Members of Congress, and think no mean thing of green parrots. And yet there are among them many of a notable plumage and song, more indeed than among the aristocracy of Volucres; just as, if the Indian proverb goes for aught, there are more pretty women among the lowest (the mehter) than any other caste. On the second floor, where nothing but clear ether checks their flight, swim the great eagles, the knightly falcons, and the vultures—grand when on their wide, loose pinions they float and circle—sordid only, like the gods of old, when they stoop to earth. These divide the peerage of the skies, and among them is universal a fine purity of color and form—a nobility of power. They are all princes among the feathered tribes, gentle and graceful as they wheel and recurve undisturbed in their own high domains, but fierce in battle and terribly swift when they shoot down to earth, their keen vision covering half a province, their cruel cry shrilling to the floors of heaven. See them now, with no quarry to pursue, no battle to fight, and mark the exceeding beauty of their motion. In tiers above each other the shrill-voiced kites, their sharp-cut wings bent into a bow, their tail, a third wing almost, spread out fanwise to the wind—the vultures parallel, but wheeling in higher spheres on level pinions—the hawk, with his strong bold flight, smiting his way up to the highest place; while far above him, where the sky-roof is cob webbed with white clouds, float dim specks, which in the distance seem hardly moving—the sovereign eagles. They can stare at the sun without blinking; we cannot, so let us turn our eyes lower—to the garden level. Ah! pleasant indeed was my Indian Garden. Here in a green colonnade stand the mysterious, broad-leaved plantains with their strange spikes of fruit—there the dark mango. In a grove together the spare-leaved peepul, that sacred yet treacherous tree that drags down the humble shrine which it was placed to sanctify; the shapely tamarind, with its clouds of foliage; the graceful neem; the patulous teak, with its great leathern leaves, and the bamboos the tree-cat loves. Below them grow a wealth of roses, the lavender-blossomed durantas, the cactus, grotesque in growth, the poyntzettia with its stars of scarlet, the spiky aloes, the sick-scented jessamine, and the quaint coral-trees; while over all shoots up the palm. The citron, lime, and orange-trees are beautiful alike when they load the air with the perfume of their waxen flowers, or when they are snowing their sweet petals about them, or when heavy-fruited they trail their burdened branches to rest their yellow treasure on the ground.
And how pleasant in the cool evening to sit and watch the garden’s visitors. The crow-pheasant stalks past with his chestnut wings drooping by his side, the magpie with his curious dreamland note climbs the tree overhead, the woodpeckers flutter the creviced ants, the sprightly bulbul tunes his throat with crest erect, the glistening flower-pecker haunts the lilies, the oriole flashes in the splendor of his golden plumage from tree to tree, the bee-eater slides through the air, the doves call to each other from the shady guava grove, the poultry—
Poultry? Yes, they do not, it is true, strictly appertain to gardens, but rather to hen-houses and stable-yards, to the outskirts of populous places and the remoter corners of cultivated fields. Yet they are—and that not seldom—to be found and met with in gardens where, if ill-conditioned, they do not scruple to commit an infinity of damage by looking inquisitive, albeit without judgment, after food, at the roots of plants, and by making for themselves comfortable hollows in the conspicuous corners of flower-beds, wherein, with a notable assiduity, they sit to ruffle their feathers y during the early hours of sunshine. These pastimes are not, however, without some hazard to the hens, for thereby they render themselves both obnoxious to mankind and noticeable by their other enemies. A cat who has two minds about attacking a fowl when in a decent posture and enjoying herself as a hen should do, does not hesitate to assault her when met with in a dust-hole—her feathers all set the wrong way, and in an ecstasy of titillation. A kite will swoop from the blue to see what manner of eatable she may be; nor, when she is laying bare the roots of a rosebush, is the gardener reluctant to stone her, whereby the hen is caused some personal inconvenience and much mental perturbation, determining her to escape (always, let it be noticed, in the wrong direction) with the greatest possible precipitancy. These same hens are, I think, the most foolish of fowls; for on this point the popular proverb that makes a goose to be a fool is in error, as the goose is in reality one of the most cunning of birds, even in a domestic state, while in a wild state there are few birds to compare with it for vigilance. The hen, however, is an extraordinary fool, and in no circumstance of life does she behave with a seemly composure. Should a bird pass overhead she immediately concludes that it is about to fall upon her head; while if she hears any sound for which she cannot satisfactorily account to herself, she sets up a woeful clucking, in which, after a few rounds, she is certain to be joined by all the comrades of her sex, who foregather with her to cluck and croon, though they have not even her excuse of having heard the original noise. But their troubles are many.
Life is many-sided. Indeed, you may examine it from so many standpoints that had you even the hundred eyes of Argus, and each eye hundred-faceted like the orb of a dragon-fly, you could not be a master of the subject from all sides. And yet how often does the man who has surveyed his neighbors from two points only—the bottom of the ladder and the top—affect to have exhausted the experience of life! For Man to dogmatize wisely on this life is to argue simplicity in it.
For instance, have you ever looked at life from the standpoint of a staging-house fowl? Perhaps not; but it is instructive nevertheless as exemplifying the reciprocity of brain and body, and showing how one trait of character, by exaggerated development, may develop and exaggerate certain features physical as well as mental, obliterate others, and leave the owner as skeletonized in mind as in body. Suspicion