Two Parables.
Here gentle reader (I seem to remember this style of address in the stories of our youth) pause with me in a little oasis of the desert-stage of our journey, and brush off some of the dust, while I briefly narrate two incidents, but I pray you also not to leave me in the midst of them so that you may escape the next short stage.
A traveller, small and insignificant, armed only with an oak cudgel, was passing alone through a South American forest. As he trudged forward he noticed at a certain point in the path (shall we call it 1894–1899?) that a jaguar was watching him and was about to break his truce with man. He turned off to the right and there he saw a puma and this too seemed to meditate evil. He hastened forward just in time as his two enemies sprang at him, and these two near relatives were locked in mortal grip—and so he passed on safe!
The reader, naturalist or layman, can point the moral for himself.
At the battle of Trafalgar, while fighting was in full progress on one of the ships, some sailors were occupied in throwing overboard the bodies of those who had been killed. A poor Scotchman badly wounded and hardly conscious was taken up by two seamen, an Englishman and an Irishman, and as they were about to throw him overboard his feeble voice was heard to say “I’m no deed yet.” “What’s that?” said the Irishman. “I’m no deed yet”; “Arrah, the doctor said he was dead, over wid him,” said the Irishman.