to the magistrate, and ask if you may stop this

once."

Thereupon the great creature came tearing round the table, barking furiously.

"Smokey wants to know if he may stop," said St. George.

"Well," answered the old man, looking down into the creature's eyes, "if he's a good dog, he may."

Perfectly understanding the permission, Smokey came back with a much more confident air, and pushing up his head under his master's arm contrived to impede the carving a good deal; going round if he was called to the various members of the family, and receiving doles from them with sober contentment, and making various little yaps, snuffles, and whines when talked to, which they declared had distinct meanings.

"They know we can talk," observed Liz, so they pick up our tones, and pretend to do it, too. It's my belief that they think they do talk."

"They live in the presence of their gods," said Tom; "they ought to have one privilege more than we have to make amends."

"To make amends for the will of their

Maker concerning them, you appear to mean," said Dick à Court, with a severe glance at Tom; and he began with great sincerity, but in a wonderfully commonplace manner, to enlarge on the certainty that all the creatures. are in their right places.

"Dick," said St. George, when this had been going on for rather a long time, "don't be didactic, there's a good fellow; you forget that we men have completely taken our favourites among the creatures out of the places we found them in."

"What does he say?" asked Mr. Mortimer, who had caught a few words.

St. George raised his voice a little, and replied, "I was telling Dick he mustn't be didactic; you're not used to that sort of thing, are you, my liege? you can't stand it.”

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No, Dick, no; better not," said Mr. Mortimer, putting up his eye-glass and openly contemplating his step-son. "He is quite right, Dick; nobody's ever didactic here."

"We could not have taken them out of their places unless it had been ordained," said Dick.

"Then it was ordained, for we have done it; and we have filled them with yearnings

towards us, and wants, and loves, that otherwise they never could have known."

"And we have demoralized them too in some respects," said Tom; "their love for us renders them unable to be faithful to one another."

"Yes," said Mr. Mortimer, to whom this was repeated, "Smokey would tear his own mother to pieces if she growled at Valentine or Giles."

"You think they are in much the same position that we should be," I asked, "if angels lived visibly on earth among us, and chose out little human children here and there to take to their homes and feed with angel's bread, and love and make much of ?"

"Yes," said St. George; "and I am thankful we do not live with such a race."

"What contempt we should feel for one another if we did!" remarked Tom.

Little Dick actually gasped with horror at these two speeches. "What can you be thinking of to talk thus of such a blessed possibility?" he exclaimed.

"I talk according to my lights," said Tom; "and as it is not ordained that I should live with angels, surely I may say that I am glad."

"Call them angels-call them whatever you like," said St. George, "but if it is allowed that they are to be as much above us as we are above the dogs, I do not see how any higher religion than fealty to them could be possible to us."

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Besides," continued Tom, "such brutes as we have tamed are influenced not only by our acts but by our intentions. We intend that they shall stay in certain fields; we put a trumpery little paling round them, or a thin hedge, or a shallow ditch; they are not consciously obedient, but our will was that they should stay there; they generally yield to this thought that was in our hearts when we made the barrier, and it becomes in consequence insuperable to them. It would be the same with us if we lived with our betters."

"Now, Smokey," said the master, in a confidential tone, to his slave, "we are going out for a walk, Smokey; we shall go through the yard. You had better look out." The dog retired with alacrity. "I am not at all sure," he went on, "that Smokey did not know we were talking of him and his people. I think he did, and felt sneaky in consequence."

Tom answered by broaching another of his

favourite notions. It was his belief, he said, that human spirits were perceptible to most other intelligences, though not to their fellows. "We appear to ourselves only to animate these bodies, but to the consciousness of other creatures we spiritually overflow them. Just as the scents of flowers pervade their neighbourhood, emanations from our spirits float in our neighbourhood. That is another way in which dominion is secured to us."

"Then what do you think our souls look like?" asked Lou, quite seriously.

He hesitated.

"I should not wonder if they give out a sort of light," she continued. "They might, you know, though it might be too faint for our mortal eyes to see it."

Tom replied that he had not considered that part of the subject, and the party broke up. The men and dogs shortly went across country together, and Mr. Mortimer took Lou and me for a walk, through a pretty dingle, and then past the two cottages with green doors, finally to a deep natural rent, which in the Isle of Wight would have been called a chine. In one part it contracted so much that a bridge was thrown across it, and looking down as we