cawing, fluttering, wheeling up, then wheeling down; what was it all about?

It was soon made plain. The old birds were lending a hand to help their bonnie black bairn up the cliff to the ancestral home. Now they seemed almost to shove the youngster with their bodies, now they flew or perched a foot or so ahead of it, and cawed and called in a most human way.

So bit by bit, the youngster constantly first protesting that he couldn't do the jump, and then apparently bragging that he had done it, we watched the old birds entice the child of their care to the home of its fathers.

"Where did you say you last saw the bird that flew this way?"

"Up there," I said half-heartedly.

Away went the raven hunter, and swifter than it takes to tell it, one of the old ravens seemed to take in the situation, and was wheeling over his head and croaking lustily. Of course the young bird croaked in answer and discovered himself. Now the chase began. The young bird took a good long, half-circling flight, and went back towards its home, and sank into the vale. Away went the hunter; across the vale, over the Dash stream, was the next flight. Away steamed our friend. Next, the raven flew in the direction whence we cane, and we all turned homewards. For more than a mile and a half the chase went on in the direction of Skiddaw Forest. Had the young raven had sense to keep out of the heather, things might have been well with it, but the heather perplexed its flight, the flights grew less and less, and at last we saw the hunter sprawl, pick himself up, run and throw himself full length upon the ground. Then we heard a kind of altercation, angry words in raven language, and after,

silence; then a white pocket-handkerchief—and a look of content upon the hunter's face told us that the chase was over. But the old birds were not going to leave till they had seen the whereabouts of their child. Croak, croak, croak, came falling heavily from mid-air. We gained the shepherd's hut and called for tea. The raven hunter tied up his handkerchief and hung it, bird and all, on a great nail at the outhouse end, "out of the way of the cat," as he said, and we talked a good deal about that raven's education, as the goodwife toasted her scone and brewed the tea.

"I shall just set it down, you see, as soon as we get home, in our back place, give it a good feed. It will be tame at once. Cats dursn't touch a raven whatever, and in a few days' time you will see that it manishes for itself, comes when mother feeds the hens, and picks up whatever it wants; terrible tame thing is a raven, and most curious bird to see what's inside anything that ever was, sic a deal of fun in 'em too, and sic games with dogs they play. Nip 'em by tail when they're asleep, and then run off and croak at 'em. Most interesting bird that flies; seem born to play pranks you know, sir."

I wonder whether the young raven prisoner heard what he said. "The most interesting bird that flies." Perhaps he did. All I know is that when we rose from our afternoon repast in the forest shepherd's cottage, we found that some hand or some head had thrust itself out of or into that pocket-handkerchief, the knots or part of them were quite undone, the handkerchief hung helplessly on the wall, and we heard the far distant croaks of triumph and defiance, and felt that the happy raven family at Dead Crags would once more be united.

The raven had "manished" for itself sooner than we or the raven hunter had thought.

MAY DAY BY GRETA SIDE.1

It was an old-fashioned May Day, there was no doubt of it. The cuckoo said so plainly, for all his stammering; the chiff-chaff up in the budding elm was sure of it; and the thrush, away among the pear-tree blossom, cried "May, May, May; Sweet, Sweet, Sweet," till the very bees about him got tired of his saying the same thing so many times over, and went off murmuring a drowsy May-day tune of their own to the hives.

As for the blackbird, he positively poked his four little squabs out of the nest just to give them a sight of a real old-fashioned May Day on the lawn. For though he was a very old bird and had seen five May Days, he had never in his life known so many oxlips out, so many tulips fully aflame, or smelt so many wall-flowers filling the air with their fragrance; had never seen so many apple-blossom buds pink to the bursting, or lime-tree buds so nearly in leaf. I doubt if he had ever before had a chance of chasing a yellow orange-tip butterfly as he did for the instruction of his youngsters, before my eyes on this the first of May.

1 The quaint old custom of crowning the May Queen was revived in Keswick in 1886.

And we had strangers in the valley, too, who had come across the sea and had travelled all up from the south coast through the new springing grasses and the "lockety gowans" and "lamb lakins," as the bairns in the north called the marigolds and faint sweet cuckoo flowers; they had timed their arrival to the very dawn, and down in the meadows they craked and craked away their salutations to the fair goddess Maia.

Nor was the corn-crake the only distinguished foreigner who had determined to see our May-day doings; for the first swallow skimmed across the lake and dashed over the blue grey cloud of chimney-smoke that rose above the happy breakfasts of the Keswick people, and flashed far up the valley, and returned to take his observations.

There was good reason that the May-day holiday should be general. Well had the common council of the burghers urged by public notice that on May the first, the "shopman should leap from his counter and till," and the 'prentice should put on his best coat and turn out at noon to join in the May Queen's Festival; for had not the Romans of old time, when they held their posts on Castrigg Fell, and had their look-out on Caermote from Castlet Hill, moved their men as on this day from their winter quarters in the meadow by the Greta side, to their airier hillside station, and led their white heifer with his gilded horns, to the sound of the panpipes and song, up to the fellside pastures. Surely no Roman legionary in this Keswick valley forgot to pour out wine to the Mother of Mercury the winged Hermes, in a place where the woodland was each year carpeted with a plant that keeps to-day the name of her son so bright, and fresh, and green. Certes, no lover of our local law and order to-day would willingly forego the

pleasure of remembering on this day that the "Majores" or Maiores," those early senators of Rome in whose honour the month of May was named, were still had in remembrance. And quite as certainly every Roman soldier of old time had his fling in the games on the first of May upon the green, and bound a chaplet of wild flowers about his helmet, and coaxed his dark-eyed British children to join in the Floralia here in the valley; yes, and bade the slave-gang, working at the causeway down to Causeway Foot, take their rest also, and hail sweet Flora, Queen.

For the Roman soldier swore by Julius Cæsar; and did not Julius Cæsar honour the month of May, and give it back the thirty-first day, which Numa had stolen from it long years before?

But there were other reasons that made it seemly that in the Keswick valley every one should welcome

"Faire May, the fayrest mayd on ground,

Deckt all with dainties of her season's pryde,
And throwing flowres out of her lap around":

for in the times that are very far off, here, on the border of Wales-the Derwent was in those days the river that separated Britain from the Waellas, or strangers--lived the Cymric men who dwelt high up on Bleaberry, or held Buck Castle maybe; and here, on May-day eve of old, they lit their bonfires or "beltein" on Barf, on Skiddaw, Helvellyn, and Catbells, and Blencathra, and sent their hoops of blazing straw rolling down the mountain side to scare the eagle in its eyrie at the Ern (Iron) crags, and to startle the wild boar in the woods below Grisedale Pike.

What a May-day night they must have had of it, those old bonfire-makers on our Cumberland hill tops. I expect the men of Mona's Island saw our rocky mountain coast